OpenBSD RAID and Temp Sensors on HP Proliant DL 360 and 380 Series

I have a bunch of HP DL 360 and DL 380 servers that I run OpenBSD on as gateways. This is how to monitor their RAID drive status and temperature status…

What you need to do is enable the IPMI driver.

If you read the man page, the IPMI driver provides an API like interface to the hardware it is running on.

This means you can query sysctl to get data like this:

$ sysctl hw.sensors
hw.sensors.acpitz0.temp0=8.35 degC (zone temperature)
hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0=online (sd0), OK

If you then yank one of a mirror set you get:

$ sysctl hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0
hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0=degraded (sd0), WARNING

If you then put a new drive back into the mirror set you get:

$ sysctl hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0
hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0=rebuilding (sd0), WARNING

Once the system has rebuilt, you get:

$ sysctl hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0
hw.sensors.ciss0.drive0=online (sd0), OK

Which is very useful and basic data needed for monitoring systems like Nagios.

There is a catch though, the IPMI driver is not enabled by default in OpenBSD GENERIC (at least at 4.4). To enable it, you have two options.

At boot time, you can enable it by doing:

>> OpenBSD BOOT 640/31744 k [1.29]
use ? for file list, or carriage return for defaults
use hd(1,a)/bsd to boot sd0 when sd0 is also installed
Boot: -c
Booting...
=======snip=======
User Kernel Config
UKC> enable ipmi
441 ipmi0 enabled
UKC> quit

This will then boot normally and if everything worked, you’ll have an operational system that you can type the above commands in to query the status of your RAID set.

If it won’t start, then reboot without doing anything and it will go back to the way it was before, then contact openbsd misc with a copy of your dmesg.

If it all worked, you’ll probably want to enable this feature permanently, to do this, use the config(8) utility like so:

# config -u -o /bsd.new -e /bsd
(tells you about the kernel)
Enter 'help' for information
ukc> enable ipmi
441 ipmi0 enabled
ukc> quit

This then will produce an output file /bsd.new which is your new kernel.

To install the new kernel, do something like this:

# cp /bsd /bsd-original && cp -f /bsd.new /bsd

And then you can reboot to an IPMI enabled system.

Enjoy.