Re: [Ipmitool-devel] invalid assumption on sel list last

[Al C. <ch...@ll...>]

Hey Andy,

By all means, I'm not trying to say that the feature itself is not
useful.  For the majority of IPMI boards, I'm sure it works fine.  But
as I'm sure you know, not all IPMI boards are created equal :-)

At the minimum, perhaps this should be documented that this is an
approximate output of the last N entries.  I don't know what the most
common use-case of this command would be, but if people script against
it, it might be good to indicate you may get < N entries on the output.

Al

On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 06:14 -0700, Andy Cress wrote:
> Al,
> 
> As the original author of that algorithm, I would disagree.  :-)
> 
> The IPMI spec does allow MCs to have gaps or variations in the SEL
> record ordering, however, in practice, most BMCs order the records
> sequentially when adding them.
> Creating gaps by deleting individual records is possible/allowed, but
> is
> extremely bad practice for an admin who cares about having an accurate
> history.  
> In any case, the side-effect in those cases of having a few less than
> N
> records shown is trivial compared with the reason for creating this
> algorithm in the first place:  to quickly view the last N records in
> the
> SEL when there may be a lengthy log that would take much longer to
> traverse.
> 
> Andy

-- 
Albert Chu
ch...@ll...
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory