experience with dell DRAC 4?

[Eric Anderson]

Andrew McNaughton wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Eric Anderson wrote:
>
>> 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!
>
> Thanks a bunch for that.  After bashing my head on an Intel out of 
> band management module for a bit, eventually getting it to do serial 
> over lan with considerable flakiness, and still offering far less 
> functionality than what the dell cards sound like they'll do, or what 
> you've confirmed, this is music to my ears.
>
> If I'm getting a machine delivered to a remote location prior to my 
> installing the OS, what needs to be configured for me to get access? 
> Network numbers presumably.  I gather the dell cards provide access 
> over ssh, so presumably there'd be some login details to be set up.  
> Anything else?

The least amount of setup needed is to configure the DRAC's IP 
information, and of course cabling it up.  Once that's done, you can do 
everything else remotely (what I did).  You can ssh into the DRAC 
(default u/pw: admin/calvin), and do lots of things.  If you have 
console redirection enabled in the BIOS, you can ssh to the DRAC, 
connect to the console, and use it to do lots of stuff.  I usually use 
the console redirection feature in the DRAC web console - it works great 
with FreeBSD 6.x with jre 1.5 installed, and gives you the actual 
video/kb/mouse console as if you were in front of the machine, great for 
fixing crashed machines, debugging, etc.

Now, I just need to get a remote-power-cycling script going on FreeBSD 
to reboot a machine automatically..


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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