Remote console access. How?

Question

I've read through much of the Dell marketing docs and talked to sales people and the OpenManage people but can't get an answer to this question, which is surprising, since it seems pretty basic.... How can I get console access (meaning a linux shell login) to a Poweredge server remotely, i.e., over the internet and not on the same subnet as the server I want to manage? Today, we use a console server that connects to the servers via the serial port, we config the linux servers to direct the console to the serial port and everything works perfectly. But it requires more console servers as we grow (more stuff to manage!) and another cable to run through the cabinets to the servers. IPMI's serial-over-LAN seems perfect, but our current vendor sells SuperMicro servers which do not support IPMI serial-over-LAN until they support IPMI 2.0 (whenever that is) but Dell's servers support IPMI 1.5 which should work. Does it work? And if so, does it work with ipmitool so that I can connect from another linux box to the server to be managed? Or do I need proprietary Dell software and/or a Windows box? I also understand that DRAC may work for this as well, but I can't get an answer on how DRAC works exactly. For example, does it require proprietary Dell software? Can it work remotely, i.e., across the internet from a remote computer? Does that computer have to run Windows? Thanks!

username42 · Answer

I ended up buying a PowerEdge server to find out the answer to this question myself, so I wanted to post it the answer here for anyone in the future who has this question...

Yes, PowerEdge servers support IPMI 1.5 Serial-over-LAN and it works very well, but only with solproxyd. solproxyd is a Dell-provided daemon you can telnet to and it acts as a proxy to the IPMI BMC on another server. If you turn on console redirection in the BIOS, you have console access to the machine at the BIOS level.

solproxyd is hard to find, but it's buried in one of the CDs that comes with the machine. It's packaged in an RPM, so if you use Debian, alien can extract it, the sample /etc/solproxyd.conf file and the init script (which requires minor editing to work on Debian).

All in all, it's a pretty good solution. I still don't know exactly what good DRAC is, but for this, it's unnecessary.

PowerEdge Hardware General

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