experience with dell DRAC 4?

[Eric Anderson]

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.


Eric




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