Questions about monitoring Dell servers

Jason Lixfeld jason+lists.freebsd-questions at lixfeld.ca
Tue May 16 16:15:16 PDT 2006



On 16-May-06, at 1:01 PM, Bill Moran wrote:

> If it's the right type of driver, the megarc port might be helpful.
> Works on our Dells.

This was a huge help!  Worked on both boxes, the FreeBSD box and the  
linux box.  Fantastic suggestion, thank you!

> DRAC is irrelevant to FreeBSD.  Configure it in the BIOS (give it an
> IP and the like) and you can use a web browser to get a console  
> window.
> (True console, so that you can access the BIOS during boot and
> everything).

I can configure an IP address on the BMC, but that's obviously  
different than the DRAC.  Before, when I tried to configure an IP on  
the BMC, I couldn't see any IP info for it at all in the system.  
Couldn't ping it, couldn't see a mac address for it, nothing so I  
wasn't sure if the BMC networking portion would work without the DRAC  
or not.

> Install ipmitool and use it to access IPMI over the network.

I tried that too, but based on above, I couldn't get the BMC to be  
seen on the network.

> We have a central machine that monitors all our servers via a Nagios
> plugin to ipmitool.  I can't offer any advice on getting OpenIPMI
> working.

Is there a particular benefit to OpenIPMI vs. FreeIPMI?  I know the  
latter is all in userland as opposed to OpenIPMI which is partly  
comprised of kernel modules (or is that just in Linux land?)

> DRAC and IPMI are completely seperate.  There is some overlap, for  
> example
> both DRAC and IPMI can be used to monitor sensors and reboot the  
> hardware.
>
> DRAC is nice in that it gives you a spiffy web interface, as well  
> as the
> whole console over IP thing.  IPMI is nice because it's a standard  
> that
> can be programmed to, with ipmitool, for example.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the IP capabilities of IPMI vs DRAC.

> -- 
> Bill Moran
> Collaborative Fusion Inc.
>



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