Ipmitool + serial vs IPMI webpage

Hardware Enterprise Gear
1

I have a Supermicro LGA1150 debian server with a dedicated IPMI port, and a serial port (RS232? the turquoise VGA one). Can I use a raspberry pi to log into the server, like I do with SSH?

Can ipmitool on the rpi do basic things like read the server's error logs and power cycle it?

If the answer to both is yes, is there any functionality I am missing by using seral + ipmitool on the rpi instead of using Supermicro's web interface for the IPMI? Really all I think I would want to do is check error logs, power cycle, and login without a working network connection on the server.

The alternative solution is using an OpenVPN tunnel with the RPi 1 Model B (slow!) as the server and my DDWRT EA2700 as the client (also slow!). It's a little messier than SSHing into my RPi from afar and using the cli to babysit my server. Port forwarding the IPMI interface to WAN sounds like a terrible idea from a security perspective.

2

I think I solved my problem: https://alnitech.com/news/supermicro-server-remote-access-via-ipmitool/

IPMItool appears to be able to do serialoverlan (SOL) as an alternative to making an adapter board to hook up the Pi to the serial port: http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection

ipmitool also does basic power and status reading, which is all I'll likely need on a regular basis. Hopefully this helps somebody in the future