Sun Fire V60x/V65x: BMC Port Conflict (Doc ID 1010907.1)

Symptoms

Ports used by LAN management conflict with those needed by the Baseboard Management Center (BMC), causing timeouts and considerable waits in completing commands.
Other utilities such as Remote Shell (rsh) and NIS services may also produce "time out" errors under heavy load, if using the reserved BMC ports.

The ports in question are 623 and 664, although the "Sun Fire V60x Server and Sun Fire V65x Server Server Management Guide" also erroneously lists port 624 (crypto admin).

The ports are described as follows:

623 (26Fh) Aux Bus Shunt (Primary RMCP Port):  Hereon referred to as the Primary RMCP Port. This port and the required RMCP messages must be provided to be conformant with the RMCP specifications. There is a mandatory set of messages that are required to be supported on this port. These messages are always sent in the clear so that system software can discover systems that have RMCP support.

664 (298h) Secure Aux Bus (Secondary RMCP Port):  Hereon referred to as the Secondary RMCP Port or Secure Port. This port is only used when it is necessary to encrypt packets using an algorithm or specification that prevents also sending unencrypted packets from being transferred via the same port. Since discovery requires sending in the clear RMCP Ping/Pong packets, the secondary port is used to transfer encrypted transfers while the primary port continues to support unencrypted packets. An implementation that utilizes this port must still support the Primary RMCP Port and the required messages on that port in order to be conformant with the RMCP specifications. Note that the common IPMI messaging protocols and authentication mechanisms in this specification do not use encrypted packets, therefore IPMI messaging does not need to use the secondary port.

BMC is part of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and uses the Remote Monitoring and Control Protocol (RMCP)

Cause