Fixing Supermicro’s IPMI issues with Noctua slow fans

I love Supermicro’s motherboards!

They are built like a tank, excellent quality, pretty good support and good documentation … That is, until you’re trying to build a silent system based on a server board with some Noctua’s slow spinning fan (the gray ones).

Try it: Connect few of them to the board, and your IPMI UI will freak out, and it will complain about those fan that sometimes have 0 RPM, sometimes 400-500, sometimes 1000, and repeat. If you’re using ESXI/vSphere, you’ll be really annoyed from all the warnings!

So, how can we fix that? easy, follow these steps:

  1. Download the IPMICFG utility for your OS from this site (you’ll need to register), and extract the file聽on the host machine.
  2. Download the User Guide and follow the installation instructions based on your OS.
  3. SSH into the machine and become root
  4. The next part is important: in your IPMI Web UI, go to Server Health and select “Sensor Readings” – check which sensor is marked with a red box. Write down the sensor name
  5. On the host, run the IPMICFG command (per the userguide) with the parameter sdr. Example: ./IPMICFD -sdr
  6. Look at the list the command produced and find the聽number of that sensor.
  7. Time to delete the sensor (don’t worry, the fan will continue to work): run the same command but add聽-del <sensor number> so if, for example, the sensor number is 1234, then the command would be: ./IPMICFG -sdr -del 1234
  8. If you’ll look at the IPMI web UI, you might be surprised to see the naughty sensor still appears and gives false alarms. The solution is simple – reboot the IPMI (it won’t reboot the server and the server will continue to work uninterrupted) using the command: ./IPMICFG -r
  9. That’s it! You shouldn’t get more alarms.

Enjoy 馃槈

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