So you’ve bought/inherited/stolen a hot HP Integrity server… now what do you do? For those not up on their EPIC systems, the HP Integrity line is Hewlett-Packard’s Intel Itanium 2-based server line running the EPIC IA64 architecture. These are seriously high-end servers and not to be taken lightly.
So you acquire one. The first thing that you may realize is that you have absolutely no way to connect to it. Well, this can be made pretty difficult by the fact that we do not know what state your server is in. If it is in pristine condition then the easiest thing to do will be to set the IP address via ARP since DHCP is disabled by default.
Look on the info card on the front of your server (on my rx2600 this is a card that has a tiny handle that you can pull forward.) On this card is the unit’s MAC address. Use this to manually set the IP address of the management system via a computer on the local subnet. First, make sure that you have plugged in and plugged in the management console ethernet connection. In this example we will set the management system address to 192.168.2.28:
arp -s ma-ca-dd-re-ss-00 192.168.2.28
ping 192.168.2.28
Where the MAC Address is the address of your machine (not my cleaverly written MAC address!) If all goes well this will set your system address and you will be good to go. If you system has already been set up for DHCP then this technique will not work. Check your DHCP server logs to see what address was handed out to the MAC Address that you just looked up.
Now, using Windows telnet or, better yet, the amazing PuTTY tool you can connection to your new server’s management console:
telnet 192.168.2.28
Or, of course, you can connect via your web browser if you have Java installed:
http://192.168.2.28/
Now, if you have an older version of MP the username / password that you are looking for are both blank by default. Just hit the enter key a couple of times and you should be in. If your MP firmware has been updated then the default username and password are Admin / Admin along with a default operator of Oper / Oper.
If your system is like mine you will now be presented with some warning and a notice that you must press ^Ecf in order to access the system. This can be a bit confusing. Here is the long description that helps to solve the mystery of what to press: Hit Control-e, then release completely. Then press c. Then press f. This is a three key “sequence” not a “chord.” Only the first character in the sequence is “controlled”.
If this wasn’t confusing enough, after hitting this three key sequence you then need to hit Control-b in order to be dropped to the Management Process system.
If all goes well, you will be dropped to the MP> command parser so that you can begin to use your system. I include this all here because my first experience with an HP Integrity rx2600 was a bit daunting and everyone online seemed to assume a rather extensive amount of access to documentation, cabling, HP resources and mind reading capacity.
Good luck and welcome to the world of the HP Integrity server!