Hi there,

I tried to enable IPMI on our DELL PE servers ( PE1850, PE2850, etc. ), right after that, when I booted those machines into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, the network connection of the systems went bad, more than 50% packet lost rate when I ping! However, when I disabled the IPMI through BMC, the network issue was resolved right away ( NOTE: I had to get "factory default" in BMC to make the network working, only turning off IPMI didn't work! )

I tried to update the BIOS from A04 to A06, and BMC from 1.40 to 1.72, and also updated all RPMs ( including ipmi ) and Kernel, but no help.

The problem happened to all servers running RHEL. However, all Windows machines are working just fine.

Please advise.
Thank you!

I had the same issue with a Dell PowerEdge 2950.
I solved it, assigning a complete different network address for IPMI. I mean, the O.S. uses an address of 192.168.0.0/24 network, and in the BMC Bios I assigned an address from the 172.17.0.0/24 network.

To access this interface with ipmitools, from my administrative workstation, I had to add an address from 172.17.0.0/24 to my NIC too.

I hope this can help you.

cheers,