How to get something useful out of a DRAC 5?

[Matthias Saou]

Hi,

I listened to my Dell sales rep. and got a bunch of servers (1950s and
2950s) with some DRACs for the first time. Up until now, I've always
just used APC switched PDUs for remotely rebooting all of my servers,
but that doesn't take care of the OS failures like unexpected grub
errors or firewall/network configuration mistakes that render the
machine unreachable.

So...

1) I discovered that it's not possible to share the 2nd integrated RJ45
port for the DRAC, only the 1st. First bummer since I always configure
my private LAN on eth1. OK, never mind, I added a logical private
network on top of my public network and hardened firewall rules
everywhere. First disappointment, though.

2) I tried to use the "Console" feature. Miserable failure. All my
workstations are Fedora 7 or development, and it seems impossible to
get the firefox extension installed and working (only a specific
firefox 1.x version is listed as supported...).
As my normal user, the extension install fails because it tries to
install to the system-wide plugins directory. So I hack the permissions
to allow that, then get a supposedly completed install, logout and
restart firefox... but then firefox still says it's missing a plugin for
"application/x-smdvv". I thought it might be java since I didn't have
it installed, but installing it didn't change anything. A google search
for "x-smdvv" returns only two hits, one being an unanswered post to
this very list about someone with the same error :-(
(this is a x86_64 workstation, but with an i386 firefox)

Second disappointment, much bigger this time. Why is it that the DRAC
doesn't have some simple VNC server? That would be absolutely perfect
for me! After having worked with some low-end Dell networks switches,
and now this, I'm starting to dislike those mandatory web interfaces
quite a lot.

3) What do I do from here? Is there _any_ way to get something useful
out of the DRAC to be able to configure the server's BIOS, see grub,
and the Linux console (I use RHEL5)? I was really hoping to simply ssh
into the DRAC and be able to change stuff there, eventually see the
BIOS and be able to control grub and RHEL by configuring a serial
console of some sort.

Any advice would be very welcome. I'll send my feedback to my sales
rep. asking Dell to consider a "simple" VNC server instead of all
this...

Matthias

-- 
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) - Linux kernel 2.6.22.1-27.fc7
Load : 0.60 0.49 0.49