Apple

Apple Lights Out Management

Apple introduced what was termed as Lights Out Management when they released their new Intel Based Servers. This is essentially nothing new when Intel based Server boards are concerned. I suppose this is just a different term to what is known as IPMI.

Functionality

LOM allows one to be able to both monitor hardware status of the server, but it also allows one to be able to power on and power off the hardware remotely. This means if the server is down, one would be able to cold power on the hardware. This functionality is very similar to the Remote Service Adapter in IBM.

Configurations

The configuration of LOM sits within Server Monitor provided by the Server Admin tools that is installed with either the XServe or the Admin tools package within the Server DVD. All one has to do is to launch the Server Monitor application, and select the Server menu item, followed by the Configure Local Machine item. Once this is done, a dialog with IP address settings is presented. Configure these with the desired IP addresses and the user name and password to access the LOM. Once that is done, Appleand exit.

Do note that there is no extra Ethernet interface that is attached to the server. This means that perhaps a virtual Ethernet port is created that uses the existing 2 Ethernet port connected on-board the server.

Quirks

There are several irregularities that i have observed when using LOM.

  1. A local machine cannot monitor itself using the defined LOM IP address. But 127.0.0.1 will work. But perhaps this is related to the point below.
  2. The IP address defined within the LOM setting would have to be setup such as a monitoring machine will be able to access its network parameters
    • This means that if you have a machine that is meant to do management, a separate network is required on top of the typical IP network.
    • This is in exception to the fact IF you setup all the IP addresses reachable within the access network to be in the same network range as the actual Ethernet ports. For example, if your actual Ethernet configuration is setup as 10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 and your LOM network ip is set to be 10.0.0.101/255.255.255.0, This is fine (but not a suggested configuration due to security).