Remote syslog for iDRAC Express (R410)

Question

I'm not sure that the remote syslog function on iDRAC Express works. I have a bunch of R410s, and the iDRAC is updated to latest firmware 1.70. I configured remote syslog but simply don't see any traffic from them. Besides looking on the syslog server itself, I've also watched from the router using tcpdump, and there's nothing.

The manual says something about making sure the syslog server is "on the same network" as the RAc - and our is on a different subnet - but that doesn't make any sense to me as a cause of failure, there's nothing about syslog which would prevent it going via the default network route..

Am I missing something?

chart3399 · Answer

I've tested this with an idrac6 express on a R815 and it does not work. I've tested it with an idrac6 enterprise on a M915 and it does work. I've got a support ticket open with Dell on this issue to figure out the root cause (IE is this really a licensed feature or just a bug). One interesting note is if you get on the idrac6 express and do a racadm racdump you can actually see the syslog daemon start and stop depending upon weather you have it enabled or not:

/admin1-> racadm racdump
*snip*
===========================================================================
Process Information
===========================================================================
7372 root 1704 S /sbin/syslogd -m 0 -f /flash/data0/etc/syslog.conf
*snip*

Peter Tsai · Answer

Hi guys, sorry to hear about your troubles. Let me shoot a note to some contacts on the DRAC team to see if they can answer these questions.

dougster61 · Answer

All, unfortunately remote syslog is only a feature found in iDRAC6 Enterprise. To compound the issue, we realized we didn't call this out in the User Guide and the fact that is shows up in the GUI for Express makes it worse. I'll work on getting these items corrected, and truly apologize for the confusion and time spent on this.

gtallan · Answer

Thanks for clarifying. It's too bad that remote syslog doesn't work, but I guess we can get the same effect using snmp traps, and having snmptrapd forward these to syslog. Just slightly more of a pain to manage...

gtallan · Answer

'Thanks for clarifying. It's too bad that remote syslog doesn't work, but I guess we can get the same effect using snmp traps, and having snmptrapd forward these to syslog. Just slightly more of a pain to manage...' Hmm, I was just looking at setting up snmp traps, and they do work fine on iDRAC express, when enabled via the web gui. But, I don't see any way to enable them from the local racadm cli. It looks like on some RAC models there's a cfgTraps config group, but that doesn't seem to work for iDRAC6 express. Am I missing something? Looking for this because it would be much easier to enable this on 100+ servers using ssh and an expect script, rather than configuring each one individually via the web gui...

Systems Management General

Remote syslog for iDRAC Express (R410)

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