August 21, 2022
Baseboard Management Controller is implemented on “enterprise” systems and along with several satellite controllers facilitates access via a platform management system. IPMI is a set of specifications for interacting with these systems. Typically the BMC provides a web interface, but there is also ipmitool which facilitates access over an ssh server running on the BMC.
There are “taps” in place to allow for serial based interaction between the BMC and the primary host metal.
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August 17, 2022
Talking with a handful of people about mobile phones and what to do about them. There is genuine interest in using simpler devices while on the move for communication but there isn’t a ton of options. Seems like we’ve landed in a local optimum of what our devices are capable of doing and why we carry them around. These devices provide significant utility, but they also come at a cost that {mentally, behaviorally} is becoming more apparent.
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May 4, 2022
For a deployment recently we wanted to create an out-of-band circuit with a root bridge on a server that had the IPMI/BMC of several edge devices connected to it. There was a complexity in that one of the BMCs was remote and was being made accessible via a transparent bridge that had an arbitrary vlan tag set. Maybe its embarrassing to admit, but for these edge devices there was a need to be able to see both ssh (ipmitool) and http (graphical kvm), so these were exposed via wireguard.
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January 5, 2020
We’d standardized on the Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F a set of deployments a while back, the last of our X10 deployments, and these boards are still kicking around with enough idiosyncrasies that it’s worth documenting. This is an uncomfortable generation of boards from Supermicro that support a lot of interesting new features, but not as easily as X11 or H11. For example you have to do most things via DOS on X10, but on X11+ and H11+ almost all hardware operations are handled via built in EFI shell.
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September 24, 2019
I’d written [about using the t470s]({{ref 2017-04-14-linux-on-the-t470s}}) a while back, since then jumping to a T480s, T480, and most recently an X1 Yoga Gen4 and X1 Carbon Gen7. These two machines are extremely small and have good manufacturing feel to them. The major downside to them is the limited memory (16G) and the thermal dissipation. Ultimately I’ve become more comfortable with the X1CG7 as there wasn’t a need for me to use the touchscreen/stylus with the X1YG4.
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April 14, 2017
Trying to find a modern laptop that works well with Linux is quite difficult. I seemed like for a long time as long as you avoided the baddies like Broadcom networking controllers you were able to find a decent machine to hack on. Then awful technology like optimus appeared and, made life a lot more difficult for the Linux adventurer. Things got even worse when optimus moved from a hwmux (bios toggle) to direct frame-buffer access, then manufactures started arbitrarily putting some video connectors on the dGPU and some on the iGPU.
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