I have a number of Dell servers in a remote data center, so I wanted to configure the iDRAC interface in order to power on the systems remotely, get troubleshooting info for Dell, etc., without going to the data center myself. I’ve never configured iDRAC except through the Lifecycle Controller via a crash-cart on bootup. I thought that I would be spending all day in the data center getting everything configured, but when I mentioned this to another sysadmin he said, “Just use ipmitool.”
I had no idea such a tool existed!
First, I installed ipmitool (I’m using CentOS):
sudo yum install ipmitoolI found a helpful website: ipmitool Cheatsheet and Configuring DRAC from ipmitool
I was a little skeptical, but I read through (most) of the ipmitool man page to make sure I had a reasonable idea what the commands would do, and then I tried one. And immediately received an error message:
$ ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static
Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0 or /dev/ipmidev/0: No such file or directoryI checked and found that the path listed does exist:
$ ls /dev/ipmi*
/dev/ipmi0Then it hit me: I need to be superuser, don’t I? That worked!
sudo ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static
sudo ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 192.168.100.1
sudo ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0
sudo ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 192.168.100.254I was then able to connect to the IP address in a browser (it warned me there was an untrusted certificate, and I added it as a permanent exception in the browser.)
The default username/password was root/calvin. I changed both the username and password right away. Even though I have the iDRAC interfaces on an RFC 1918 subnet and behind a firewall, why take the risk of keeping the default values?
As I discovered though, pay attention to the iDRAC password restrictions. Otherwise you may need to use ipmitool to reset the iDRAC admin password.