BMC: Enable SNMP Traps for Hardware Failures

You can enable SNMP traps to be sent from a BMC/iDRAC/Whatever using a few IPMI commands.  This works on every Dell server I have ever tested but didn't work on HP systems I have tried.  I imagine it would work on servers from most other vendors.  I know there are vendor-specific tools to do this, but I prefer using industry standard protocols to administer systems and really don't like having to install a lot of extra vendor tools and daemons.

Enable IPMI Over LAN from the OS using FreeIPMI

Maybe you just heard about how wonderful it is to control your hardware remotely.  Maybe you forgot to configure IPMI Over LAN on a production system's BMC and you don't want to reboot.  Fear not!  Enabling IPMI Over LAN can (usually) be done from the OS using freeipmi.

freeipmi *-config tools primer

Basic usage of bmc-config, pef-config, and other freeipmi *-config tools

The documentation below should work for all freeipmi *-config commands.  It only discusses how to connect to a BMC (including iDRAC, iLO, etc) then read from and modify its configuration.  I picked bmc-config to demonstrate program usage, though the same parameters will work for all the related commands.

In some places I reference the "-f" parameter which allows you to specify a filename.  In newer versions it appears to still work but have been deprecated by "-n".