Re: experience with dell DRAC 4?

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Eric Anderson wrote:

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!

Thanks a bunch for that. After bashing my head on an Intel out of band management module for a bit, eventually getting it to do serial over lan with considerable flakiness, and still offering far less functionality than what the dell cards sound like they'll do, or what you've confirmed, this is music to my ears.

If I'm getting a machine delivered to a remote location prior to my installing the OS, what needs to be configured for me to get access? Network numbers presumably. I gather the dell cards provide access over ssh, so presumably there'd be some login details to be set up. Anything else?

Andrew


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