experience with dell DRAC 4?

[Eric Anderson]

Eric Anderson wrote:
> Andrew McNaughton wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have experience of Dell's remote access card, the DRAC 4? 
>> (as sold for the dell poweredge 850 I'm looking at).
>>
>> Dell suggests that it's possible, at least for windows, to install an 
>> operating system remotely via one of these cards.  If that were 
>> possible with FreeBSD, it would be very useful for me for deploying 
>> remote servers.
>>
>> Short of that, out of band serial access for remote management of 
>> servers is the base criteria I'm looking for, and I'd be interested 
>> in any feedback on how the dell card performs, and any issues 
>> relating to FreeBSD
>> compatibility.
>>
>> If there's competing products I should be aware of that might also be 
>> useful information.
>
> I use them in all our servers (1850s, 2850s), and they work very 
> well.  The latest FreeBSD-6.1-BETA4 I believe detects the DRAC as a 
> usb keyboard/mouse, and also sees the virtual CD-ROM, however I have 
> not used it for an install yet.  I have some spare 2850's that I could 
> test this out on though if you were interested.

Just to report back on this:

Using a Windows box to be the virtual cd-rom device provider (uses asp, 
which only works on IE I think), I successfully booted, and installed a 
FreeBSD 6.1 machine completely across the network, using the DRAC card.  
Works like a charm!


Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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