Re: experience with dell DRAC 4?

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!


Eric



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

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