experience with dell DRAC 4?

[Eric Anderson]

Andrew McNaughton wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Eric Anderson wrote:
>
>> 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..
>
> I gather the DRAC does ipmi as well as console access.  If so, then 
> ipmitool makes it easy to script this.  eg something like:
>
>   ipmitool -H <host> -U user -f <file with password> chassis power cycle


There is IPMI support - but I have to admit, I'm not sure how to use 
it.  There's a config area for IP information, but I'm not certain where 
there's a physical connection to connect it through - unless I'm 
supposed to use the same IP info as the DRAC (they are different 
configuration areas).  Either way, I haven't been successful with it yet..

If anyone is currently using IPMI on Dell servers with FreeBSD, I'd love 
to hear details..

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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