[] For those who aren't familiar with it, what is IPMI? The IPMI specification defines a set of interfaces for platform management. It is utilized by a wide variety of vendors for system management on motherboards. The features of IPMI that most users will be interested in are sensor monitoring, remote power control, and serial-over-LAN. The specification covers many additional features too. [] When and why was FreeIPMI started? In October 2003, California Digital Corp. (CDC) was contracted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for the assembly of Thunder, a 1024 node Itanium2 cluster. The motherboards selected for this cluster had IPMI 1.5 support. At the time Thunder was being assembled, there were very few open-source IPMI projects available, let alone projects that could support the HPC and security requirements that would be needed for a 1024 node cluster at LLNL. Developers at CDC, led by Anand Babu, had begun several IPMI related projects internally for their customer base. At LLNL, I had begun working on several IPMI related projects that would be needed for Thunder. While Thunder was being assembled, we worked on alot of these projects together, and eventually merged it together into FreeIPMI. Since that initial merger, developers from LLNL, CDC, and Zresearch (where some former CDC developers went to) have continued the primary maintenance and development of FreeIPMI. [] Where does the project stand at this point? FreeIPMI 0.4.2 was just released on August 3rd, 2007 and is production stable. It covers the majority of the IPMI specification that we believe most would find useful. This includes features/tools for BMC configuration, sensor reading, system event log reading, console access, and power control. [] How many active developers currently work on FreeIPMI? At this point in time, FreeIPMI is quite stable and offers the majority of features specified in the IPMI 2.0 specification. The active development of FreeIPMI is winding down a bit, with one developer developing/maintaining on a semi-regular basis, with another 3-5 others contributing from time to time. [] How does FreeIPMI compare (in your view) to similar projects (Free or non-Free)? Taking a high level view, I believe most would view command-line open-source IPMI projects like IPMItool and IPMIutil to be pretty similar to FreeIPMI. All of our projects have features/tools for the typical power control, sensor reading, serial-over-lan, etc. needs. There are subtleties between the various projects that offer various pros and cons. The differences range from debug/error help, output parsability, various minor features, and coverage of the IPMI specification. I believe the major "value-add" provided by FreeIPMI compared to other open-source projects is our HPC support. Our "hostrange" functionality allows users to specify a large number of cluster nodes for parallel out-of-band IPMI access. The output can be subsequently consolidated to determine current cluster status. The config file features of several configuration tools allow IPMI configuration to be copied to other cluster nodes quickly and subsequently verified. Most of the proprietary IPMI implementations we've seen from vendors tend to be simpler command line tools without many features or GUIs. I believe these are perfectly fine tools for most end users, but for those with large data centers or clusters, I don't believe they're very scalable. [] Can you give me any idea of how big and/or active the FreeIPMI user community is? In my opinion, the FreeIPMI user community is sizable but not large overall. The average individual, perhaps only having a few servers/nodes, will probably find FreeIPMI equally useful to other open-source and closed-source software. Most probably default to whatever is provided by the vendor. We've found a number of people in the HPC community have adopted FreeIPMI because the HPC "value-add" is recognized over other solutions. Those who see the benefit are also willing to spend the time on the steeper learning curve needed to use some of FreeIPMI's tools/features. [] What needs to be accomplished before the next release of FreeIPMI? FreeIPMI is now quite stable and production ready so not much more. Most of the work being done on the 0.5.1 release is "cleanup" to polish it up and to add a few of the missing IPMI 2.0 specification features. A serial driver is also being considered for 0.5.1, but it depends on developer time. [] What are the biggest obstacles the FreeIPMI team faces in development? I think the biggest obstacle facing not just FreeIPMI, but the entire IPMI open-source community, is vendor IPMI compliance. Vendor compliance to the IPMI specification is widely varying across the industry. We have seen products range from nearly perfect compliance to practically alternate implementations not even resembling IPMI. In my opinion, the industry average is around "not-quite-so compliant". In all fairness to the industry, the IPMI specification is a gigantic 500+ page document, so it can be tough to get their implementation perfect. The question that arises for all IPMI users is will the vendor implementation be "compliant enough" for open-source software to work. If the vendor does not official support a specific open-source software, who knows if it will work. [] Is there anything else about FreeIPMI you think our audience should know? I'd like to ask that users of not just FreeIPMI, but any open-source IPMI software, to please complain to your vendors if an open-source project isn't working and you believe it's due to IPMI non-compliance. By letting companies know you are dissatisfied with their non-compliant product can you help all IPMI open-source projects work on a larger number motherboards.