Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

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> No support for ACPI sleep.

To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal for these to be either fully on or off all of the time. You could make an argument for warm spare servers, but there's other ways to accomplish it than ACPI sleep, and I'd probably consider warm spares a relatively niche need, considering I'd rather leave them hot-but-outside-production for system monitoring purposes. Would be more annoying to wake a sleeping system and find it has a failing drive/RAM/NIC, bad switchport config, etc.

> No support for 4 and 3 pins fans. 3 pins are 100% speed all the time.

To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal to run your fans at full speed all of the time.

> IPMI web interface straight out of 2010

Does it have HTML5 remote console, and basic component diagnostics? If so what else would you like? I've been a datacenter tech, a linux sysadmin, and a devops engineer, depending on the company for a decade now, and really only ever used IPMI for those two things so I'm curious where the other use cases are. I've also used Dell PowerEdge and HPE servers, which have slightly nicer looking UIs but perform the exact same functions more or less.

> To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal to run your fans at full speed all of the time.

Case fans for rack mount chassis are very powerful, and also can take up a significant amount of energy when running full-bore (not to mention the mechanical wear).

I haven't used a server chassis in over a decade where the fans were running at full beyond a few brief seconds at startup. I'm not sure if they used a four-pin header or some other mechanism, but fan speed control is a normal and expected feature in server hardware.

> Does it have HTML5 remote console, and basic component diagnostics? If so what else would you like?

IPMI specifically is meant to be a standardized remote management interface. It (mostly) works for basic things, but more advanced functionality is hit-or-miss, or absent entirely, leaving you at the mercy of proprietary tools. Redfish is supposed to be better, although I personally haven't used it.

Web interfaces can be hit-or-miss in terms of functionality and UX. Additionally, I've often found these web interfaces to be unstable -- either being very slow or not loading at all, to certain features of the UI not loading data or hanging the interface.

Word. I borrowed a circa 2005 – 2010 server and the fan roared on start-up. I would not want that on full-time for reasons of noise, power and wear.

> and also can take up a significant amount of energy when running full-bore (not to mention the mechanical wear).

In datacenters, colocation datacenters like Digital Realty, you often pay a set amount per month for power out of a rack. Doesn't matter if you use 1kWh or 3000kWh, you paid $X for electricity for each of Y number of server racks for the billing period. So this is another case where their ideal customer just frankly doesn't care how much electricity the fans consume. Supermicro just doesn't care about homelabbers because that's not the people they tend to do business with. Datacenters buy Supermicro servers and sell their old ones on Craigslist to homelabbers.

> It (mostly) works for basic things, but more advanced functionality is hit-or-miss, or absent entirely, leaving you at the mercy of proprietary tools.

You didn't really say anything that you're missing from IPMI specifically here. I was really looking for like a specific feature that you found missing, because customers often think they want more when something is "simple" but don't really even have a use case for more. And even more often, there are times where the desired solution a customer is looking for isn't the best solution.

So this completely removes it as an option for all the SMB out there that host on prem.

I don’t at all see how you’re getting a take-away that it completely removes it as an option. And I work at a company of ~60 that hosts Supermicro servers on prem. We just don’t run them like underneath our desks where it sounds like you’re expecting them to go.

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