If your (server-class) machine has a networked IPMI BMC then you can do remote reset with it just as well if the machine runs LinuxBIOS as it would with the vendor BIOS. Well it *should* work, who knows :-)
yep, it certainly ought to work, ... It will fail if:
- IPMI cpu shares an ethernet port with the main system
That is supposed to work actually, using a VLAN and a direct connection between BMC and NIC.
- remote controller has timed out the ARP entry for the system you
are trying to reset
because the IPMI CPU does not respond to ARP.
For remote management you typically use MAC addresses, not IPv4, so it *should* work. It's all bloody fragile though.
You're much better off depending on a watchdog timer than IPMI. IPMI has not worked out. From reading the standard, I would have to guess the folks who wrote it are not really OS people -- but I'm guessing.
Well certainly not open source OS people ;-)
</rant>
Segher