HardwareSupportMachinesServersDellNotes
Ubuntu on Dell Poweredge Servers
Update (2015-09)
Note, the information below is from 2009. Dell now has a ubuntu repository that may help and/or supersede some of the bits below: http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/ubuntu/
Hardware monitoring
You can monitor the hardware using the IPMI tools - the dell OMSA drivers are not needed. All you need to do is install ipmitool and load the ipmi modules:
sudo apt-get install ipmitool sudo modprobe ipmi_msghandler sudo modprobe ipmi_devintf sudo modprobe ipmi_si
After installing the tool and activating the modules, you can query the server status via ipmi. Issuing
sudo ipmitool sel elist
will print out the event log, and
sudo ipmitool -I open sensor list
will output all the devices and their current status.
If you would like the ipmi modules to load at boot, just add them to /etc/modules.
Dell RAC
The Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) is an optional component that can allow you to reboot and access the system's BIOS remotely.
DRAC3
Installing racadm
Dell only provides RPMs for the racadm tool, but it's easy enough to extract the portions we need:
sudo mkdir /tmp/dell cd /tmp/dell sudo wget http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/OMSA_5.5/pe2650/rh50/srvadmin/srvadmin-racser-devel-5.5.0-364.i386.rpm sudo apt-get install rpm rpm2cpio srvadmin-racser-devel-5.5.0-364.i386.rpm | sudo cpio -idmv sudo mkdir /usr/lib/dell sudo cp opt/dell/srvadmin/rac3/libs/* /usr/lib/dell/ sudo cp opt/dell/srvadmin/rac3/bin/racadm /usr/sbin/racadm sudo touch /etc/ld.so.conf.d/dell sudo chmod 777 /etc/ld.so.conf.d/dell echo "/usr/lib/dell" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/dell sudo chmod 644 /etc/ld.so.conf.d/dell sudo ldconfig
Once installed, you can use the racadm tool to access cards by ip address. If you want local access (ie, access not by ip address), you'll need to perform extra steps.
You could also use the racadm deb package from http://www.akk.org/~calvin/dell/racadm_2.0-2_i386.deb, but it is not as up to date.
Configuring local access
To configure local access to the card, you need to start a ppp connection to the card on its internal serial port. To find the serial port, look for a 16550A serial port in the dmesg output:
user@host:~$ dmesg | grep 16550 [ 2.427327] Serial: 8250/16550 driver4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled [ 2.427498] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a NS16550A [ 2.428642] 00:05: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a NS16550A [ 2.429371] 0000:01:04.1: ttyS1 at I/O 0xdc80 (irq = 21) is a 16550A
In this case, it is ttyS1.
Next, start up PPP using the serial port:
sudo pppd /dev/ttyS1 1382400 crtscts noipdefault noauth lock persist connect 'chat -v "" CLIENT CLIENTSERVER "\\c"'
Now you can use racadm to connect locally to the RAC card. This is quite useful if you want to set the RAC external NIC ip address so that you can get into the web management page.
HardwareSupportMachinesServersDellNotes (last edited 2015-09-16 18:58:46 by S0106789684c02e9f)