GENERAL TROUBLESHOOTING
Most often, IPMI over LAN problems involve a misconfiguration of the remote machine's BMC. Double check to make sure the following are configured properly in the remote machine's BMC: IP address, MAC address, subnet mask, username, user enablement, user privilege, password, LAN privilege, LAN enablement, and allowed authentication type(s). For IPMI 2.0 connections, double check to make sure the cipher suite privilege(s) and K_g key are configured properly. The bmc-config(8) tool can be used to check and/or change these configuration settings.

The following are common issues for given error messages:

"username invalid" - The username entered (or a NULL username if none was entered) is not available on the remote machine. It may also be possible the remote BMC's username configuration is incorrect.

"password invalid" - The password entered (or a NULL password if none was entered) is not correct. It may also be possible the password for the user is not correctly configured on the remote BMC.

"password verification timeout" - Password verification has timed out. A "password invalid" error (described above) or a generic "session timeout" (described below) occurred. During this point in the protocol it cannot be differentiated which occurred.

"k_g invalid" - The K_g key entered (or a NULL K_g key if none was entered) is not correct. It may also be possible the K_g key is not correctly configured on the remote BMC.

"privilege level insufficient" - An IPMI command requires a higher user privilege than the one authenticated with. Please try to authenticate with a higher privilege. This may require authenticating to a different user which has a higher maximum privilege.

"privilege level cannot be obtained for this user" - The privilege level you are attempting to authenticate with is higher than the maximum allowed for this user. Please try again with a lower privilege. It may also be possible the maximum privilege level allowed for a user is not configured properly on the remote BMC.

"authentication type unavailable for attempted privilege level" - The authentication type you wish to authenticate with is not available for this privilege level. Please try again with an alternate authentication type or alternate privilege level. It may also be possible the available authentication types you can authenticate with are not correctly configured on the remote BMC.

"cipher suite id unavailable" - The cipher suite id you wish to authenticate with is not available on the remote BMC. Please try again with an alternate cipher suite id. It may also be possible the available cipher suite ids are not correctly configured on the remote BMC.

"ipmi 2.0 unavailable" - IPMI 2.0 was not discovered on the remote machine. Please try to use IPMI 1.5 instead.

"connection timeout" - Initial IPMI communication failed. A number of potential errors are possible, including an invalid hostname specified, an IPMI IP address cannot be resolved, IPMI is not enabled on the remote server, the network connection is bad, etc. Please verify configuration and connectivity.

"session timeout" - The IPMI session has timed out. Please reconnect.

If IPMI over LAN continually times out, you may wish to increase the retransmission timeout. Some remote BMCs are considerably slower than others.

Please see WORKAROUNDS below to also if there are any vendor specific bugs that have been discovered and worked around.