I have been reading some articles about system fans, and monitoring them and the like.  I have some Dell Precision R5500 rack mount systems.  For the life of me I can't figure out, following online instructions from blogs, how to access the monitoring data.  Tried in both Windows and Linux.  Tried like FreeIPMI and other similar tools but they never return anything.  The blogs I see show a list in a dos or Linux shell window with a laundry list of system status information.

Is there any advice on how to pull up this information?  All the articles are in reference to BMC support.  Does the Precision R5500 have this?  Or has it been depreciated?  All the articles I read about BMC and IPMI are usually around older systems.

As a side question, if I happened to have a MD1200 hard drive array connected thru an H800 array card, does that have similar diagnostic support?  Does it support BMC?

I've also heard about Drac but not sure what that is about.

Thanks.

JR