I received a HP ProLiant Microserver G6 from my workplace as it was decommissioned. I was thinking what could I do with such server as I already had a few physical servers at home. After some thoughts I decided I don’t have a NAS at home and given the new server had 4 x 1TB drives I didn’t think much and decided to setup a NAS with TrueNAS CORE OS.
Firstly, I took apart this old piece of equipment and cleaned it thoroughly.
Took off CPU cooler and revealed AMD Turion II Neo N54L CPU, with dual core 2.2Ghz processor and 8GB DDR3 physical memory it was more than enough for a NAS project. I also applied new thermal paste but old one was still fresh. Oh well won’t hurt I suppose.
Assembled all four drives to caddies and connected Samsung 128GB SSD to SATA5 port (CD-ROM). CDs aren’t used much anymore and SSD for boot volume will give great performance boost.
Here comes the fun part. It’s time to give this machine a running OS. I created a bootable TrueNAS image with rufus of course.
Install process was straight forward, just had to select which drive to use for OS, network parameters and hostname. Did not bother to take any pictures, and Walla!
I thought this server has two ethernet ports, but second apparently is IPMI card, for remote management. Sadly, password is lost and I will need to reset it using IpmiTool according to servers documentation. Just feed this string to IPMI board’s IP address:
ipmitool raw 18 47 82 2 0x70 0x61 0x73 0x73 0x77 0x6f 0x72 0x64 0x00 0x00
0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00Well this didn’t go according to plan, ipmitool did not exist in TrueNAS. I had to live boot an ubuntu server which of course also did not have ipmitool and could not download. I decided to quickly install ubuntu server on the drive and ipmitool still gave me an error as it was “not found”
After a while of googling how to make ipmi load I found I need to create a file:
cat /etc/modprobe.d/ipmi.conf
options ipmi_si type=kcs ports=0xca2This way linux booted with ipmitool loaded. Other methods included running running modprobe ipmi_devintf or other modules, but it did not work for me.
Command to reset was.
ipmitool user list 2
ipmitool user set password [ID]And it worked.
Well looks like sometimes things are truly complicated. Several times I wanted to stop trying to reset this password but it was interesting for me to see what was inside this remote management tool’s console. By the way HP’s documentation with ipmitool raw… Did not work, go figure.