Monday, June 18, 2007

Supermicro H8DAR-T version detection

The Supermicro H8DAR-T motherboard comes in (at least) two flavors. The differences that I know about between the two versions are:

* The version 2.01 board will run Opensolaris/Nexenta out of the box. This is because of a difference in the SATA controller hardware. The version 1.01 board will not run Opensolaris without an add-on controller card.

* The 1.01 and 2.01 boards use different hardware sensors (For temperature, fan speed, etc). We get sensor stats through our IPMI cards; because of this the IPMI cards need to be flashed to the specific version of the hardware. The IPMI cards do work for poweron/poweroff and console redirection without this specific firmware, only the sensors do not work if the IPMI firmware mis-matches the motherboard version.

Unfortunately, I do not see enough of a difference at POST time to be able to tell them apart. However, there are two ways I know of to do the detection.

1. With the cover of the machine off, the version can be seen in the back left corner of the board. (Will post pics later)

2. Under linux, use the "dmidecode" command. The system board uses "Handle 0x0002". What works well for me is "dmidecode |grep -A3 'Base Board' ". v1.01 boards report their Version as "1234567890" (way to go Supermicro!). v2.01 boards report as being Version "2.0". Examples:

v1board:~# dmidecode |grep -A3 "Base Board"
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: Supermicro
Product Name: H8DAR-T
Version: 1234567890


v2board:~# dmidecode |grep -A3 "Base Board"
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: Supermicro
Product Name: H8DAR-T
Version: 2.0

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