Serial Over LAN (SOL) session drops on Cisco switch with Broadcom IPMI firmware v2.20 - IBM BladeCenter

Resolving The Problem

Source

RETAIN tip: H182802  

Symptom

In some instances, an established Serial Over LAN (SOL) session drops for a period of five minutes. This problem occurs with Broadcom IPMI firmware version 2.20 on the HS20 processor blade.
 
The problem can occur at two different times:  

1. During a power on of the processor blade: Normal session traffic occurs, but when the operating system reloads the Ethernet driver, the Serial over LAN session drops for a period of five minutes.
2. During extended connectivity times

In both situations, you see the Serial over LAN session go to the Active and Not Ready states. You must then wait five minutes for the Management Module to time-out the current inactive session so you can restart it. Once the session is restarted, normal Serial over LAN communication is possible.

Affected configurations

The system may be any of the following IBM BladeCenter:  

• BladeCenter, type 8677, any model
• BladeCenter HS20, type 8678, any model
• BladeCenter HS20, type 8832, any model
• BladeCenter T, type 8730, any model
• BladeCenter T, type 8720, any model

The system is configured with BRET59D and higher diagnostics.
 
The system's diagnostics pass.
 
The BIOS levels affected are:  

• all

The Firmware levels affected are:  

• all

Solution

This behavior will be corrected in a future release of Broadcom IPMI firmware. The target date for the release is, 4th quarter, 2004. It will be available from IBM's xSeries Support Web site.

Workaround

When this failure occurs, the Management Module shows the state as "Not Enabled" and "Not Ready". You must wait five minutes. Then you must go to the Serial over LAN Configuration panel on the BladeCenter Management Module. On that panel you must wait for the Serial over LAN session on the failing blade to go into the "Enabled" state. When this happens, you can then go to the actual Serial over LAN session on the blade and restart the session. You can then log into the blade to begin working with it.
 
If the Serial over LAN session drop occurs during the loading of the operating system and you want to change some configuration information during the time the Serial over LAN session is "Not Ready", you must wait until the operating system is completely loaded. Then you must restart the operating system.
 
During an operating system restart, the Ethernet operating systems drivers are not reloaded, so the Serial over LAN session does not become "Not Ready". During this second operating system load, you have complete access to the serial interface and to the system resources.

Additional information

The procedure described above ensures the successful restart of the Serial over LAN VLAN with the Cisco Switch Module.