Ayayayay... I found the problem.

It turns out that in the SLC6 machine the admins installed for me in 904, I had a different ipmitool then I had in the lab.

My standard SLC6 install in the lab contains ipmitool 1.8.11-12.el6_2.1, which is the 'original' ipmitool, and which works. The machine in 904 contains ipmitool installed from a different RPM: OpenIPMI-tools 2.0.6-11.el5. This version of ipmitool installs in the same place and from the outside looks the same, but is actually quite different under the hood. In this case: it does not work. Somehow it does not understand the response from the AMC13 or from the MCH. I suspect this is something to do with the double bridging, but don't really get the details.

For the moment I installed the working ipmitool version in B904 by hand, and now everything seems to work just fine. I'll open a ticket with the sysadmins to see how to follow up on this.

Thanks for your help thinking about this problem. Let's remember this failure case in case other people get caught by the same trap.

Cheers, Jeroen

-- EricHazen - 10 Dec 2013