Old Gigabyte IPMI Troubles

AndrewGWaag · September 14, 2025, 2:13am

Hi all!

I’ve been trying for many hours to get the IPMI working on an old Gigabyte motherboard I’m using in a Proxmox VE host.

It was working a few months ago, but stopped sending responses to pings or HTTP/HTTPS connections for no clear reason. It is able to send ARP messages and can even attempt to receive an address from a DHCP server, but does not respond to any packets sent its way. Additionally, commands using ipmitool complete normally, and all self-tests are successful.

I’ve been troubleshooting for a while now, but I’ve hit a wall and I’m not sure what to try anymore. I’d appreciate any tips, tricks, or recommendations anyone has on dealing with non-responsive IPMIs!

Config info:

Dedicated IPMI port is specified in BIOS
Serial console redirection is enabled in BIOS
Static IP addressing info set in BIOS

Troubleshooting steps tried:

Different Ethernet cable/different port on switch
BMC firmware update - oldest and newest versions tested with no success
Tired letting the IPMI get an address from DHCP (ipmitool)
Enabled, disabled, and reset IPMI firewall (ipmitool)
Warm reset and cold reset (ipmitool), and pulled power on server
Reset to factory defaults (BMC firmware update, don’t preserve settings)

Links:

Motherboard - https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MU70-SU0-rev-10
Management Console User Guide - https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Manual/server_manual_mgt_console_userguide_v1.x.pdf
Motherboard User Manual - https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Manual/server_manual_mu70-su0_en_1002.pdf

Dutch_Master · September 14, 2025, 4:42am

Most obvious: did you try rebooting the system (BCM) by unplugging power?

rcxb · September 14, 2025, 5:16am

Pulling the power is a good idea if ipmitool bmc reset cold was tried and didn’t work. Otherwise you can try:

IPMI login failed

With some really old intel BMCs I had to do some crazy low-level config to get IPMI to work:
ipmitool lan set 1 arp respond on
ipmitool lan set 1 auth ADMIN MD5
ipmitool lan set 1 access on
ipmitool channel setaccess 1 2 link=on ipmi=on callin=on privilege=4

IPMI login failed - #6 by rcxb

AndrewGWaag · September 14, 2025, 6:10pm

Yup! I tried pulling power, and warm and cold resetting the BMC with ipmitool. Unfortunately no dice

AndrewGWaag · September 14, 2025, 6:14pm

Tried cold resetting and pulling power, didn’t work unfortunately : (

I will try the command you suggested, I think I tried a similar one earlier. Thank you!!

AndrewGWaag · September 15, 2025, 1:24am

Just tried this command, but it doesn’t appear to have worked. Still can’t get any response from the interface.

Is there anything else you’d like me to try?

rcxb · September 15, 2025, 7:58pm

I would try switching from the dedicated port (“BMC”) to shared (Gigabyte doc says it will use “NIC2”).

If that doesn’t work, changing ALL the network settings to something else and back, including those you haven’t set like VLAN ID (that or an incorrect subnet mask is the most likely cause of ARP working but ping is not).

I don’t have a Gigabyte with BMC in front of me. Found these in a quick search: