Right, this surprised me. They're doing IPMI, so why not SOL (Serial over LAN) to get the raw stream?
Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.
No a career building those types of tools taught me SoL is garbage from most vendors. Cray, Dell, and HP are (arguably) best with mostly reliable SoL, but they still are awful. If you paste a buffer too big into a SoL session, the dell DRAC will freeze, so you have to kill and restart the serial connection. If you have > 1000 machines, hardware serial is the best thing to do for management, in addition to IPMI for power management.
Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.