Comments on: Setting up a DRAC card using Debian

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:37:43 +0000

Fantastic! Looks like this article hasn’t had much attention in over a year (or at least in the comments), but I’ve been looking for this and it worked like a charm. Thanks for posting up the tip — always appreciate learning from the work other people do!

By: Gilou

Gilou — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 08:55:26 +0000

Hi,

In case the DRAC was in DHCP mode, you need to put it in static mode before you set the parameters:
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static

And you are right, you don’t need to restart it once it’s set, it seems to cycle the settings at least it did on a setup like that: DHCP default, set to static, wait a few seconds… and iface went up

Thanks for that post anyway, I didn’t think at first of using IPMI to work with the DRAC.

By: Tom Mason

Tom Mason — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:46:01 +0000

Sorry for the long delay in responding to this!

I’ve upgraded all of the firmwares to the latest 1.45, and so far it’s all been dandy!

The old firmware also had a problem whereby the remote console refused to work after a few times! The new JAVA one seems to work much better, as long as your browser can open it correctly (Firefox3 on MAcOSX seems to have issues!)

By: Laurie

Laurie — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:33:29 +0000

Hey Tom,

I’ve yet to see that happen so far, are they DRAC5 cards? Running the latest firmware presumably?

Bit strange it wouldn’t even come back with a cold reset via ipmitool. The only time I saw that was on the DRAC4 cards we had in a couple of older machines that required a full power cycle to take the new network settings.

Cheers, Laurie

By: Tom Mason

Tom Mason — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:40:24 +0000

Thanks for this article Laurie, I’ve been wondering how to do this for a while now but never got round to checking it out.

I’m wondering if you’ve ever encountered a problem I’m seeing fairly often (a few times a year across random servers – all dell):

The DRACS card will just stop responding to the ip it’s been allocated, so no web interface or anything. It still responds to ipmitool on the server, but even a cold reset doesn’t fix the problem.

The only fix I’ve found is to totally power down the machine, and cycle the power to the entire box – as you can imagine, not great for production machines!