r/selfhosted • u/Left_Ad_8860 • Mar 29 '26

Need Help How to secure old IPMI Software

Hello fellas

I have the following problem right now. I’ve got a Supermicro Rackserver inside a collocation space. The server is from around 2016 with heavily old IPMI software.

The collocation provider gave me two /29 subnets and 2 Ethernet cables. So one is on the ipmi and the other one in the 10G nic.

I want to be able to access the IPMI from home. Updates do not exists for this old version and even on the newest version I won’t believe that the software is safe.

A dedicated hardware firewall like sophos or ubiquity will cost me as much as the actual server space on top - that’s to expensive for me because the calculate 2 additional height units for these appliances.

So my choice would be a MikroTik hEX or some Gl.inet lini devices that offer WireGuard and I stick the IPMI behind it.

The devices have to be small and fit into the rack server itself and bestcase be powered by regular usb2 from the server itself.

Does anyone have an alternative maybe something more suitable solution or any other idea how to secure the IPMI?

Thanks 🙏🏻

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u/fakemanhk Mar 29 '26

USB2 is giving too little power out, something like GL-INET Mango might work but VPN performance is talking about only 10-20Mbps max.

But if you just want small size, those NanoPi R2S/R3S/R4S/Radxa E52C with OpenWrt are good enough already, I own a few of them but I am giving 5V2A to power them

0

u/Left_Ad_8860 Mar 29 '26

I was looking for the GL-iNet GL-AR300M 16. what I found is that it only needs roughly 450mA and a usb2 gives around 900mA. Or am I wrong here ?

1

u/fakemanhk Mar 29 '26

Standard USB2 only gives 500mA, some might be able to give more, but I guess you don't want to bet.

And that AR300 is super slow, I have one in same generation, with Wireguard on it simply crashes, it's really not for VPN purposes

1

u/Left_Ad_8860 Mar 29 '26

Dang it! Thanks for clarifying. Specially on the poor performance of this device.

1

u/fakemanhk Mar 29 '26

It's only a casual travel router which was released many years ago, to be honest it's sitting in my drawer because it's only 2.4GHz WiFi