IPMI Help

[Roschlynn Dsouza]

First Year IT Engineering student from Mumbai.

Need some help for IPMI.

Wanted to configure my MSI B350M gaming pro motherboard for IPMI as it will help me to access my home PC from college and run the necessary engineering simulations. Any idea as to how to do it?

Also is it necessary to have a board which is IPMI compliant?

 

My specs:-

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X (stock cooler)

Corsair Vengence 8GB DDR4 2400 MHZ 

Zotac GeForce GTX 1050TI

MSI B350M Gaming Pro

1TB WD Blue HDD and 250GB WD Blue SSD

FSP Hexa 450W 80+ Bronze Power Supply

 

My simulations include circuit simulations in MATLAB and 3D Rendering in solid works and projections in AutoCad. Most of the college PC's run Ubuntu with the USB ports disabled and no google drive and onedrive access without permission. That's why most of my fellow people carry their laptops during practicals.

My laptop is right now incapable of running simulations as it houses a Core I3 4005u and 4GB Ram. Waiting till next year for a capable laptop. Till then I have to rely on my Gaming pc for simulations and running them when I'm in college will be a great way for me to explain it to the teachers. Plus my college offers me gigabit lan networking. 

Any way to enable IPMI on this board? I checked the bios and did not find any such thing. Also in windows, I enabled "Only allow a magic packet to wake this pc". But it did not work.

[KirbyTech]

That board does not support IPMI so no options for you. Buy a proper server motherboard that supports it. Or even better buy a Dell R710 and use iDRAC 

[Roschlynn Dsouza]

Is there no other option available? Because I don't want to buy a new board which supports it nor a new system?

Plus computers are costly here in India due to shortage of components as people are buying components for cryptocurrency mining?

[jj9987]

IPMI helps to get hardware information and manage some system (not OS) configuration even if it is turned off. If you just need SSH, VNC or some other kind of remote access, you can just use VPN or some other software that fits your needs - you don't need IPMI capable board.

[Roschlynn Dsouza]

2 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

IPMI helps to get hardware information and manage some system (not OS) configuration even if it is turned off. If you just need SSH, VNC or some other kind of remote access, you can just use VPN or some other software that fits your needs - you don't need IPMI capable board.

How should I go about it then? Does it require any special configuration? Can it be used with TeamViewer?

[brwainer]

IPMI requires that the motherboard have a BMC - Baseboard Management Controller - which is a completely seperate CPU (usually ARM based) that runs its own OS. You can’t add a BMC or IPMI to a system that doesn’t already have it. Some systems include a BMC but require a separate addon to enable it - but yours does not.

 

You can use things like TeamViewer or LogMeIn for your purpose. Or if you can run a VPN Server on your router, then you can VPN into your network and use RDP. It is not safe to port forward RDP.

[Roschlynn Dsouza]

18 hours ago, brwainer said:

IPMI requires that the motherboard have a BMC - Baseboard Management Controller - which is a completely seperate CPU (usually ARM based) that runs its own OS. You can’t add a BMC or IPMI to a system that doesn’t already have it. Some systems include a BMC but require a separate addon to enable it - but yours does not.

 

You can use things like TeamViewer or LogMeIn for your purpose. Or if you can run a VPN Server on your router, then you can VPN into your network and use RDP. It is not safe to port forward RDP.

What if my system is turned off and I want to turn it on from my college? It is not actually a good idea to keep my desktop on 24/7 ?

 

[brwainer]

2 hours ago, Roschlynn Dsouza said:

What if my system is turned off and I want to turn it on from my college? It is not actually a good idea to keep my desktop on 24/7 ?

 

For most components that would die, like fans and hard drives, wear and tear really comes from starting and stopping. Components that can take damage from constant operation only do so if you always have them at their limit. If your computer is just idle most of the time then it is fine to run it 24/7 - you are more likely to run into issues with your operating system or programs becoming weird and requiring a restart than you are to be killing your computer.

 

You can look at your BIOS and see if it has a setting to automatically turn on at a certain time, but this might also mean setting your computer to auto-login depending on what type of remote access you choose to use. Another option is to try to set up Wake-on-LAN which means that the ethernet adaptor listens for a so-called “magic packet” and will turn on the system if it hears one. The primary issue with WoL is that the packet can only be sent on the local network unless you are able to get really fancy with the router (sending WoL over a VPN will work if it is a Layer 2 VPN, not if its a Layer 3 one. You can read more here https://hackernoon.com/wake-on-lan-through-the-internet-491817e2dd41 ) Alternatively some routers can send a WoL packet for you - the way you would use this is first you connect to your VPN server, then you access the router’s admin page, and from there you choose to send the WoL packet. 

[Roschlynn Dsouza]

48 minutes ago, brwainer said:

For most components that would die, like fans and hard drives, wear and tear really comes from starting and stopping. Components that can take damage from constant operation only do so if you always have them at their limit. If your computer is just idle most of the time then it is fine to run it 24/7 - you are more likely to run into issues with your operating system or programs becoming weird and requiring a restart than you are to be killing your computer.

 

You can look at your BIOS and see if it has a setting to automatically turn on at a certain time, but this might also mean setting your computer to auto-login depending on what type of remote access you choose to use. Another option is to try to set up Wake-on-LAN which means that the ethernet adaptor listens for a so-called “magic packet” and will turn on the system if it hears one. The primary issue with WoL is that the packet can only be sent on the local network unless you are able to get really fancy with the router (sending WoL over a VPN will work if it is a Layer 2 VPN, not if its a Layer 3 one. You can read more here https://hackernoon.com/wake-on-lan-through-the-internet-491817e2dd41 ) Alternatively some routers can send a WoL packet for you - the way you would use this is first you connect to your VPN server, then you access the router’s admin page, and from there you choose to send the WoL packet. 

My Bios does not have a feature to turn on the system at the specified time. But I enabled wake on lan in my windows device manager and the bios with "Only allow a magic packet to wake the system" and used the app you told me. Seems to work pretty well and turns on the system as expected. My router supports sending Wol over the internet after configuring a port forwarding and the subnet mask and ip address. The only thing left for me is to test the system from my college which is like 10 kilometers away from my home. Will be using teamviewer with unattended remote access mode to complete the setup. Hope whether it works and helps me in my simulations otherwise ill have to wait till next year for a laptop capable of this.

Thanks @brwainer