Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

I found the Tyan documentation for the M3291 to be a little weak. I ran into trouble the first few times I did this and finally came up with a formula that works every time. I am not familiar with your particular server enclosure, but I'll bet the routine is the same.

One difference with your server from mine is that you don't have the Broadcom chipset for your NIC's. I had to also flash that to the newest version or I couldn't even poll the LAN settings.

Here are a few things to check with the M3291:

1) I had to boot using a Windows 98 floppy and boot to a DOS command line with CDROM support. After flashing the SMDC, you need to run a program called "UH8.exe". There are DOS and Linux command line versions of this program, but I've only successfully made this work using "UH8.exe". The path on the CD for me was "D:\utility\dos\uh8.exe".

Once inside this program (which displayed a lot of goofy characters to the screen), I had to install the configuration script. It was the last menu option called "Config Script". Once in there, type "m3291.cfg" and it will load the default settings onto the card. If I skipped this step, I could never make the user accounts and passwords work.

2) Next in the "uh8.exe" utility, go to the "Lan Config" option. I've discovered a few things about this that the documentation doesn't cover very well. The biggest of which is that if you want to talk to the SMDC card AND the server at the same time, you need to set up a unique IP address and unique MAC address.

Here's the way I do it and it works every time. If you open the server case, the two NIC ports are at the back labelled with two MAC addresses. The port with the lowest MAC value is the primary port of the server. This is the ONLY port that the SMDC card will respond to so make certain you have a CAT5 cable attached to that port and connected to a switch on your local network. You can test this by plugging a cable into it with power off to the server and the link light will come on and show activity.

I then take that MAC address and mangle the number a little and put that into the LAN config. So if your MAC address of that port is "00:11:22:33:44:55", I put something like "00:11:AA:33:44:55" into the LAN config page. There is a possibility of a duplicate MAC on your network, but the odds are very small. You might want to search them out and make certain what ever you picked out is unique.

I use a /16 network so I also give it a unique IP address. It's easier for me if I change the third part of the IP. So if the server IP is going to be 172.16.5.30, I might set the SMDC IP to 172.16.6.30. Again, this is a preference on your part.

3) The Broadcast ARP option always seems to be "0" when I start the process, but always ends up being a "1" when it's over. I don't really have a suggestion here but I will tell you that having this enabled has always worked for me.

4) Once you save this, you will need to set up the user account passwords on the "User and Password Setting" screen. But this is not required for your ping tests.

At this point in time, you should be able to ping the SMDC card with the server power on or off. A great test is to power the server off and try to connect from the Tyan management console with the user "Admin". If it connects, you should be able to turn the power on. After the server starts up, you should be able to ping both addresses and access both of them simultaneously.

Once these steps were performed, I found I could configure anything I wanted to from the Linux command line using the "uh8l" command found on the disk.

Good luck!