@benjojo

> _to the bmc_

​

@benjojo Yeah I mean I'm the last person to criticize someone doing something that sounds weird but works, but it *does* sound weird.

@benjojo ASRock make some really weird and interesting stuff. I present to you the ASRock P4 Combo - https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4%20Combo/

@benjojo did you consider trying to port OpenBMC to this board?

I currently stick to HPE hardware at work, just to get a somewhat nice BMC and continuous support&updates for it. But I'm considering to try cheaper boards, like Asrock or Supermicro, and porting OpenBMC to them.

@benjojo the BMC is just for emergencies - but when there is an emergency, a proper UI and features like a good remote console, how the virtual storage is implemented and so on decide how fast you can bring your machine back online. so even if i don't use the BMC all day, i consider a good BMC important.

Also i use it for monitoring and logging, this has helped me in the past to figure out hardware issues that would have cost me quite some time to diagnose without.

Regarding porting OpenBMC - you would definitely need to have a dedicated test board of the exact same model on your bench before attempting this.

@benjojo for bgp.tools i guess you have quite a few systems in far remote colo locations. how do you deal with securing access to the BMCs on these systems?

These cheaper BMC variants tend to regularly have security issues, and if someone gets root on it, at least with the Aspeed it is game over for the server since you can DMA the whole memory of the server. So I would not dare to directly open them to the internet.

@benjojo @electronic_eel Entirely fair, though if you do ever change your mind and want to pursue that, I've done a number of ASRock OpenBMC ports (and maintain the meta-asrock layer in the OpenBMC tree) and would be happy to offer assistance!