If you’ve ever been in a situation where your Quanta BMC is misbehaving and you need to reset it, you may have noticed that the built in CLI for remote management (SMASH) is missing ipmiutil, or at least it was on my machine.

To reset the BMC on a Quanta machine, SSH to the out of band IP address of the server.

Once you’ve logged in, run show to list the available ’targets’ for the SMASH CLI.

You should (at the very least) see 2 targets; SP and SYS. If you run show {name-of-target} then you’ll see details of that target. For me, running show sp shows details of the BMC module (firmware versions etc). Running show sys lists details of the managed server like interface MAC addresses.

To reset the BMC of the server, run reset sp. The BMC module will be reset, your SSH session terminated and any web GUI sessions will time out.

It will take a few minutes for the BMC to start up and become available via the web and SSH.

Pro tip: If you cannot login using your admin account

Thanks to a post on Twitter, you can SSH in using the username: sysadmin and the password: superuser

This took me some time as a lot of Quanta searches show the manufacturer website and plenty of whitebox rebranding making it all but impossible to find real documentation. Hence this articles existence.