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.

CategoryHardware