Today I was faced with the problem of setting the IP address of a DRAC (dedicated Dell Remote Access Card, which are super by the way, and a lot lot quicker than Sun’s effort) in a Dell server that was powered on, running something production on the Debian OS, and I had no physical access to the server, so no rebooting for configuration was possible.
Now, if you have an idea of what IP address is on that card already you can talk to it remotely which isn’t a problem. The problem was, I had no idea what the IP address was currently set it to and it wasn’t DHCP. Even so, I had no copy of the racadm command, the Dell tool to control the card. (omconfig is available on Debian now which is nice, but omconfig bmc is a deprecated command and indicates to use racadm!)
Let me tell you how to set the IP address with just a simple install of Debian and little effort. (I’m sure this on the internet somewhere but I had difficulties finding it. I expect my Google-fu was weak today.)
Install IPMItool from apt:
apt-get install ipmitool
Load the IPMI driver into /dev/ so we can talk to the card:
/usr/share/ipmitool/ipmi.init.basic
You can now print the current config of the card:
ipmitool lan print 1
Set the new IP address up, if you want to configure it manually:
ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 172.0.0.10 ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0 ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 172.0.0.1 ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static
Or set it to DHCP if you want:
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc dhcp
Check your settings:
ipmitool lan print 1
Reboot the DRAC; You may not have to do this, I did (and/or I’m impatient)
ipmitool mc reset cold
Within a minute the card should be up and responding to ping. Hurrah!
Note: I tried these on a DRAC4 card, and whilst it looked like it was accepting my instructions, it seems it was infact completely ignoring me. I had to configure this one manually in the BIOS. These commands work fine on a DRAC5 though.