An IPMI Request Visualization Tool

[Andrew Jeffery]

On Fri, 22 May 2020, at 08:09, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Sui Chen <suichen6 at gmail.com> wrote:
>     > Thanks for your interest! I'm also using dbus-pcap to track certain
>     > issues on the BMC recently, and would like to add support for all DBus
>     > messages to the visualization tool, making it somewhat resemble a GUI
>     > version of dbus-pcap.  The goal would be to be able to use this tool to
>     > investigate both DBus and IPMI. The way I plan to use it would be more
>     > similar to how I use GPUView (full-system timeline rather than
>     > inspecting individual packets)
> 
> Interestingly, I was not that clearly aware of dbus-pcap :-)
> I ought to know more, as the lead libpcap maintainer.
> Is this visualization tool part of openbmc, or is it a generic dbus
> visualization tool?

It's not really a visualisation tool so much as a script that will interpret the D-Bus-specifics of a D-Bus pcap. It's a commandline script that provides filtering based on D-Bus match specifications. You can capture all traffic on the system bus in any systemd-based system with `busctl capture > /tmp/my.pcap` and then run `dbus-pcap my.pcap` to dump the packet contents.

> 
> We recently brought rpcapd into the mix; it can be invoked via ssh.
> I wonder if that might help you as a debug tool?

I'm not sure, I'm not familiar with rpcapd. I'll have a google.

> 
>     > If you ask how this user interface might differ from the already
>     > existing dbus visualizers such as bustle, my answer would be: it will
>     > present information in a way that's more relevant to the BMC, putting a
>     > bit more focus on BMC-specific DBus messages, such as HWMon and RedFish
>     > DBus messages, to present information in a high signal-noise ratio way.
> 
> Would this need to run on the BMC itself?

Hopefully not given `busctl capture` ?

Andrew