Hi all, with this mail I want to make you heroes aware of "slimhat.opensuse.org". This machine is installed in the same data center as "widehat.opensuse.org". Both those machines are cross-connected and can be used as "backdoor" to the IPMI interface of the other machine. In this way we can access the IPMI interfaces (console, etc.) remotely in a secure way (and will hopefully not need to drive to this datacenter for simple reboots ;-)). Here is some more documentation:
Both machines have 4 NICs and one additional IPMI interface. They are cross-connected to each other via point-to-point IP connections in the following way:
widehat/IPMI [172.16.0.5] <-> slimhat/pciright [172.16.0.6] slimhat/IPMI [172.16.0.9] <-> widehat/pcieup [172.16.0.10]
So, in order to access widehat's IPMI interface connect to slimhat and use port-forwarding to forward HTTP(S): $ ssh root@slimhat.opensuse.org -L8443:172.16.0.5:443 You can then access localhost:8443 locally. Alternatively you can also you ipmitool(1) to control the server remotely.
We were able to use this mechanism to reboot the machine already once remotely, as it was somehow "stuck" (no logs available :-/), so this does indeed safe some work / travel / effort. SSH access to slimhat.opensuse.org is restricted to the IP range(s) of SUSE plus some documented exceptions [1]. Feel free to open a merge request in case you want to be able to access this machine via SSH also. Martin Caj & Ricardo Klein have been super helpful in setting up this machine, so please consider to buy them a beer the next time you meet them (e.g. this weekend ;-)). Best regards, Karol Babioch P.S.: Yes, I'm aware of current disk / capacity issues with widehat.opensuse.org :-/. [1]: https://gitlab.infra.opensuse.org/infra/salt/blob/production/pillar/id/slimh...