Checking for a Dell DRAC card on linux

Mon 20 May 2013

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Note to self: this seems to be the most reliable way of checking whether
a Dell machine has a DRAC card installed:
sudo ipmitool sdr elist mcloc

If there is, you'll see some kind of DRAC card:

iDRAC6           | 00h | ok  |  7.1 | Dynamic MC @ 20h

If there isn't, you'll see only a base management controller:

BMC              | 00h | ok  |  7.1 | Dynamic MC @ 20h

You need ipmi setup for this (if you haven't already):

# on RHEL/CentOS etc.
yum install OpenIPMI
service ipmi start
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Dell OMSA

Mon 22 Mar 2010

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Following on from my IPMI explorations, here's the next chapter in my getting-down-and-dirty-with-dell-hardware-on-linux adventures. This time I'm setting up Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator software, primarily in order to explore being able to configure bios settings from within the OS. As before, I'm running CentOS 5, but OMSA supports any of RHEL4, RHEL5, SLES9, and SLES10, and various versions of Fedora Core and OpenSUSE.

Here's what I did to get up and running:

# Configure the Dell OMSA repository
wget -O bootstrap.sh http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi
# Review the script to make sure you trust it, and then run it
sh bootstrap.sh
# OR, for CentOS5/RHEL5 x86_64 you can just install the following:
rpm -Uvh http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/platform_independent/rh50_64/prereq/\
dell-omsa-repository-2-5.noarch.rpm

# Install base version of OMSA, without gui (install srvadmin-all for more)
yum install srvadmin-base

# One of daemons requires /usr/bin/lockfile, so make sure you've got procmail installed
yum install procmail

# If you're running an x86_64 OS, there are a couple of additional 32-bit
#   libraries you need that aren't dependencies in the RPMs
yum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61.i386 pam.i386

# Start OMSA daemons
for i in instsvcdrv dataeng dsm_om_shrsvc; do service $i start; done

# Finally, you can update your path by doing logout/login, or just run:
. /etc/profile.d/srvadmin-path.sh

Now to check whether you're actually functional you can try a few of the following (as root):

omconfig about
omreport about
omreport system -?
omreport chassis -?

omreport is the OMSA CLI reporting/query tool, and omconfig is the equivalent update tool. The main documentation for the current version of OMSA is here. I found the CLI User's Guide the most useful.

Here's a sampler of interesting things to try:

# Report system overview
omreport chassis

# Report system summary info (OS, CPUs, memory, PCIe slots, DRAC cards, NICs)
omreport system summary

# Report bios settings
omreport chassis biossetup

# Fan info
omreport chassis fans

# Temperature info
omreport chassis temps

# CPU info
omreport chassis processors

# Memory and memory slot info
omreport chassis memory

# Power supply info
omreport chassis pwrsupplies

# Detailed PCIe slot info
omreport chassis slots

# DRAC card info
omreport chassis remoteaccess

omconfig allows setting object attributes using a key=value syntax, which can get reasonably complex. See the CLI User's Guide above for details, but here are some examples of messing with various bios settings:

# See available attributes and settings
omconfig chassis biossetup -?

# Turn the AC Power Recovery setting to On
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=acpwrrecovery setting=on

# Change the serial communications setting (on with serial redirection via)
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=serialcom setting=com1
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=serialcom setting=com2

# Change the external serial connector
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=extserial setting=com1
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=extserial setting=rad

# Change the Console Redirect After Boot (crab) setting
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=crab setting=enabled
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=crab setting=disabled

# Change NIC settings (turn on PXE on NIC1)
omconfig chassis biossetup attribute=nic1 setting=enabledwithpxe

Finally, there are some interesting formatting options available to both omreport, for use in scripting e.g.

# Custom delimiter format (default semicolon)
omreport chassis -fmt cdv

# XML format
omreport chassis -fmt xml

# To change the default cdv delimiter
omconfig preferences cdvformat -?
omconfig preferences cdvformat delimiter=pipe
3 Comments

IPMI on CentOS/RHEL

Thu 11 Mar 2010

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Spent a few days deep in the bowels of a couple of datacentres last week, and realised I didn't know enough about Dell's DRAC base management controllers to use them properly. In particular, I didn't know how to mess with the drac settings from within the OS. So spent some of today researching that.

Turns out there are a couple of routes to do this. You can use the Dell native tools (e.g. racadm) included in Dell's OMSA product, or you can use vendor-neutral IPMI, which is well-supported by Dell DRACs. I went with the latter as it's more cross-platform, and the tools come native with CentOS, instead of having to setup Dell's OMSA repositories. The Dell-native tools may give you more functionality, but for what I wanted to do IPMI seems to work just fine.

So installation is just:

yum install OpenIPMI OpenIPMI-tools
chkconfig ipmi on
service ipmi start

and then from the local machine you can use ipmitool to access and manipulate all kinds of useful stuff:

# IPMI commands
ipmitool help
man ipmitool

# To check firmware version
ipmitool mc info
# To reset the management controller
ipmitool mc reset [ warm | cold ]

# Show field-replaceable-unit details
ipmitool fru print

# Show sensor output
ipmitool sdr list
ipmitool sdr type list
ipmitool sdr type Temperature
ipmitool sdr type Fan
ipmitool sdr type 'Power Supply'

# Chassis commands
ipmitool chassis status
ipmitool chassis identify [<interval>]   # turn on front panel identify light (default 15s)
ipmitool [chassis] power soft            # initiate a soft-shutdown via acpi
ipmitool [chassis] power cycle           # issue a hard power off, wait 1s, power on
ipmitool [chassis] power off             # issue a hard power off
ipmitool [chassis] power on              # issue a hard power on
ipmitool [chassis] power reset           # issue a hard reset

# Modify boot device for next reboot
ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe
ipmitool chassis bootdev cdrom
ipmitool chassis bootdev bios

# Logging
ipmitool sel info
ipmitool sel list
ipmitool sel elist                       # extended list (see manpage)
ipmitool sel clear

For remote access, you need to setup user and network settings, either at boot time on the DRAC card itself, or from the OS via ipmitool:

# Display/reset password for default root user (userid '2')
ipmitool user list 1
ipmitool user set password 2 <new_password>

# Display/configure lan settings
ipmitool lan print 1
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc [ static | dhcp ]
ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 192.168.1.101
ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0
ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 192.168.1.254

Once this is configured you should be able to connect using the 'lan' interface to ipmitool, like this:

ipmitool -I lan -U root -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status

which will prompt you for your ipmi root password, or you can do the following:

echo <new_password> > ~/.racpasswd
chmod 600 ~/.racpasswd

and then use that password file instead of manually entering it each time:

ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status

I'm using an 'ipmi' alias that looks like this:

alias ipmi='ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H'

# which then allows you to do the much shorter:
ipmi 192.168.1.101 chassis status
# OR
ipmi <hostname> chassis status

Finally, if you configure serial console redirection in the bios as follows:

Serial Communication -> Serial Communication:       On with Console Redirection via COM2
Serial Communication -> External Serial Connector:  COM2
Serial Communication -> Redirection After Boot:     Disabled

then you can setup standard serial access in grub.conf and inittab on com2/ttyS1 and get serial console access via IPMI serial-over-lan using the 'lanplus' interface:

ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 sol activate

which I typically use via a shell function:

# ipmi serial-over-lan function
isol() {
   if [ -n "$1" ]; then
       ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H $1 sol activate
   else
       echo "usage: sol <sol_ip>"
   fi
}

# used like:
isol 192.168.1.101
isol <hostname>

Further reading:

12 Comments