Howto Change the IPMI Password

  Author: Mike Horansky <moho@stanford.edu>
 Subject: Changing IPMI passwords on live systems
Revision: 5-Oct-2007 by Morpheus
Revision: 12-Jun-2008 by whm

This procedure should work on Dell PowerEdge 1850 and 1950 systems (or similar Dell systems with IPMI enabled).

Make sure the IPMI kernel modules are enabled by running
```
modprobe ipmi_si
modprobe ipmi_devintf
```
You can also ensure the modules are loaded on reboot by adding ipmi_si and ipmi_devintf to /etc/modules. However, this is not strictly necessarily unless you are monitoring the hardware with IPMI.
If ipmitool is not installed already, run
```
aptitude install ipmitool
```
then start a local ipmitool shell session
```
ipmitool shell
```
Test the ipmitool shell session with the command "user list 2", you should see the response:
```
ipmitool> user list 2
ID  Name             Callin  Link Auth  IPMI Msg   Channel Priv Limit
2   root             true    true       true       ADMINISTRATOR
```
Set the password for the root ID with the command
```
user set password <ID>
```
You will be prompted for the password. The ID is normally 2. You can now exit out of the ipmitool shell with the "quit" command.
Do a verification locally on the server:
```
 ipmitool user test 2 20
```
For verification from a remote host, test the new IPMI password by connecting to the IPMI interface remotely by running
```
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <hostname>-ipmi.console.sunet -U root -A MD5 -a shell
```
and running the command "chassis status".

You can actually do all of this using ipmitool on a remote system, but the new password you are assigning is likely going over the net in the clear.