Patent ID: 8069257

Claim:
A method for communicating with a computer management device, the method comprising: (a) defining a vendor specific command conforming to the small computer systems interface (SCSI) standard for communicating with the management device, the management device having an intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) firmware and a baseboard management controller configured to monitor health-related aspects of a host computer, and the management device operative to emulate a mass storage device that is operatively accessible to the host computer on a communications link, conforming to the universal serial bus (USB) standard; (b) encapsulating an IPMI command in the vendor specific SCSI command; and (c) transmitting the vendor specific SCSI command with the encapsulated IPMI command over the USB communications link; (d) receiving the vendor specific SCSI command at the management device; (e) determining if the received vendor specific SCSI command is an emulated device command for communicating with the emulated mass storage device, then: (f) when the received vendor specific SCSI command is an emulated device command for communicating with the emulated mass storage device, passing the vendor specific SCSI command to the emulated mass storage device; and (g) when the received vendor specific SCSI command is not an emulated device command for communicating with the emulated mass storage device, extracting the IPMI command from the vendor specific SCSI command and passing the IPMI command to the IMPI firmware.