How to get something useful out of a DRAC 5?

[Ronan Mullally]

Hi Matthias,

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007, Matthias Saou wrote:

> 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.

You can do all this using IPMI.  The [12]950s support IPMI 2.0 so Serial
Over LAN with ipmitool is a doddle for out of band (well, nearly) access.

The only thing that's likely to catch you out is having your OS shut down
the network interface when the OS goes down, that'll clobber your IPMI
access.  You need to make sure your init scripts don't down the interface.


-Ronan