The BMC is getting new tricks

UPDATE: And it's out! Talos II, Blackbird. I'll do the Blackbird update this weekend first. The web view of the serial port (for Petitboot) is particularly nice for those of us without GPU blobs in our firmware.

On Twitter Raptor is teasing an upcoming new BMC build for all Raptor family systems (Talos II, T2 Lite and Blackbird) offering web-based environmental monitoring and firmware updates. I'm a command line jockey myself and I didn't find the previous SSH-based means too onerous, but a web-accessible environmental monitoring system could be quite useful for centralized setups (especially if there's an API or some other means to scrape the data into a dashboard). Since this data is directly served from the BMC, it would be more complete than what ibmpowernv offers now and being directly pushed should be faster than ipmitool which can take several seconds to gather information (see our DIY GNOME IPMI fan tool for a real-world example). If you can't wait, it looks like this code is publicly available in Raptor's git tree right now, but you'll have to build it yourself (you should anyway) since there don't appear to be beta builds just yet.