ipmitool: lanplus: hanging on getting cipher suites

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2

Situation

On SLES15 SP2 (kernel 5.3.18*), the following ipmitool command is hanging for 46 seconds every time it is run, where in the past it returned after less than a second:

ipmitool -N 10 -R 4 -I lanplus -H <ip-address> -U <username> -P <password> fru print 0

The following message is returned: “Unable to Get Channel Cipher Suites”.

This issue occurred with ipmitool-1.8.18+git20200204.7ccea28-1.22.x86_64.rpm (included with SLES15 SP2).

Resolution

The workaround is to include the command line option -C 3 to the ipmitool command.

This makes the default cipher revert to 3 (the default from previous versions of ipmitool).

Cause

This issue is a result of the change in the ipmitool code which tries to detect which cipher suite should be used before establishing a connection. This is described here:

https://github.com/ipmitool/ipmitool/issues/29

The man page has not been updated to reflect that the new default cipher suite is 17, instead of 3.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

The delay seen is 10 seconds unless the "-N 10" argument is set, which causes the delay to last ~45 seconds.

This is only seen on hardware that doesn't support cipher suite 17.

Disclaimer

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