After we procured all the hardware peripherals to set up the Mt Collins server, we encountered some issues.
After connecting the BMC cable to a router, we managed to access BMC WebUI, but we were unable to get to the next step.
The VGA shows the IP address of the rack server when the server is turned off, but there is no VGA output when the server is turned on.
Now this is the main problem: According to the manual, we should be able to see the POST screen after starting the system to enter the BIOS. However, we could not see the POST screen at all. We tried hard restarting the system, removing NVMe, and plugging in the bootable thumb drive, all to no avail.
We cannot see anything from the VGA screen. We tried different operations through BMC, but we couldn’t get it to show a POST screen.
The VGA shows the IP address of the rack server when the server is turned off
I don’t understand how there can be any VGA output when the server is off?
How is the VGA connected: are you looking at the output from the BMC web page, or do you have a monitor attached to the VGA port on the system?
I was originally working with VGA but now I am just working off of BMC web page because I couldn’t get the VGA to work. I doubt it would be a firmware issue so I’m trying to upgrade the firmware first.
While updating the firmware, I accidentally upgraded SCP firmware first. I later realized that it said I should do “MtCollinsBmc… .hmc” first. Would this cause problems down the road? I selected separate images instead of “Both Images” when I did it.
Afterwards, I installed the MtCollinsBmc… .hmc, altra_scp_signed… .hmc, and collins_aptiov… .hmc in order
Okay I updated all the firmware but still I cannot see anything when I launch h5viewer from BMC. It keeps saying “No Signal.” I tried completely powering it off and back on to try cold reboot but to no avail as it doesn’t display anything. How should I fix this?
Do you see any log messages or POST codes indicating the boot progress?
Can you connect the SOL (Serial Over LAN) console to see what it’s reporting?
I’m not sure about that system, but some have a few consoles accessible by running:
Then with instance=2, instance=3. I’m not sure of the exact order, but one instance will be the SCP, one the ATF and another the host.
That should hopefully let you see where things are stopping before VGA is initialized.
Is it possible to run IPMI even when POST screen is inaccessible? I thought BMC should be able to open KVM and I can use terminal from there, but it seems like terminal is just off signal
Yes, since the BMC runs on a separate processor, as long as it has booted you can run ipmi commands regardless of the state of the main processor.
It takes a couple of minutes for the VGA to be initialized and show any output, during which time lots of messages are printed to the various serial consoles. For example the SMpro and PMpro processors boot first, and then power on the main ARMv8-A processor. That then runs through DRAM initialization and training before starting the UEFI firmware.
The UEFI firmware does work including PCIe initialization and enumeration at which point the VGA port gets initialized and the monitor/KVM starts showing information.
If you connect to the SOL ports, you can see all that going on before the VGA is activated.