Comment 3 for bug 110992

I happen to have access to a Poweredge 1850. Using Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS (Dapper), the following workaround seems to work ( from http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/341#comment_5 ):

nano /usr/share/ipmitool/ipmi.init.basic

The top section looks like this:

# load the ipmi modules
modprobe ipmi_msghandler
modprobe ipmi_devintf
if ! modprobe ipmi_kcs_drv ; then
modprobe ipmi_si # try new module name
fi

This script check doesn't work, and throws an error that it can't load the KCS driver.

Change it to:
modprobe ipmi_msghandler
modprobe ipmi_devintf
modprobe ipmi_si # try new module name

Save as: /usr/share/ipmitool/ipmi.init.debian

I didn`t need to creat the device manually, though. Did you have to do that ?

To start the OpenIPMI driver, do:
/usr/share/ipmitool/ipmi.init.basic

You can test the local (KCS) IPMI interface by issuing:
ipmitool -I open channleinfo

Although my LAN interface is configured, the following command failed for me:
ipmitool -I lan -H HOST_IP_ADDRESS -U USERNAME -a channel info

More information about setting up and using IPMI on Dell servers can be found at:
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q04-20040204-Murphy.pdf