>>10227343Alright here's the rest of the blogpost then. Say you're a sysadmin and your servers are on another fucking continent. The server's BMC basically lets you physically be at it. You can interact with it remotely, not just through an OS or RDP or SSH or whatever. BIOS settings, you can plug virtual "flash drives" in. You can "hit the power button."
Some of them get very fancy. This fucking board in particular doesn't like to boot DOS from a flash drive unless I disable all of the UEFI boot options and re-enable all the Legacy/CSM crap, which is a pain in the ass. Supermicro's IPMI console will update the BIOS for you, but I had to update the BMC firmware first to add the feature, which is where the bricking started. It says it will restart the BMC. It does not, it gets stuck on in a semi-functional state. It'll open a remote console but it won't do anything else, and you can't tell it to restart itself either because it won't listen. It was still on and I could still use RDP to get into Windows, but if I'd shut it down at that point, I wouldn't have been able to turn it back on at all. Fixed it only to find out it was a paid feature, and an easily stolen one.
>inb4 DOS lolTheir Linux BIOS updater also bricks boards, and using AFUWIN is fucking insanity. AFUDOS is ancient but it does one thing and does it reliably. Couldn't get it to boot to DOS anyways, it ignored both the remotely mounted ISO and the flash drive I fucking plugged into it. BIOS update over IPMI actually went flawlessly.
Wait until you find out how you actually have to use the console...>>10227416Of course, it'd be a waste if I hadn't.
