To perform tasks such as diagnosis, troubleshooting or installation of the operating system in Out Of Band (OOB) mode, three tools are commonly used: Putty, PXE and IPMI tools.

 

PuTTY

PuTTY is a terminal emulator, serial console and network file transfer application. It supports several network protocols, including SCP, SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw socket connection. It can also connect to a serial port.

 

PXE

Pre-boot execution environment is a set of standards that enables a computer to load an operating system over a network connection.

 Booting on PXE

According to the type of the server we would have the following options to log in to PXE

 

For general servers

Using keyboard and display (F12 boot PXE, F11 boot order)                                          //Usually in Lenovo laptops

 

For MOC servers

Get in to the console using UART or USB ports through a laptop

 

IPMI tools

Once we get into PXE we can use the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) that is a standardized computer system interface used by System Administrators for out-of-band management of computer systems and monitoring of their operation.

 

IPMItool is a utility for managing and configuring devices that supports IPMI.

 

ipmitool lan print                                                                         //Will check management port (red) oob

ip address                                                                                           //Consider AOC 2 ports

ipmitool fru print                                                                             // See all information of the asset

dmidecode -t 1                                                                                  //Check SN flashing the chip

route -n                                                                                            //View route table not for gral server

Check physical connections and try to ping 192.168.1.10 (blue cable)