Tag: iDRAC

Reset the iDRAC administrator password via ipmitool

In the previous post, I configured the iDRAC interface on a Dell server using ipmitool on CentOS. However, I ran into a problem, which I blame on poor user interface design:

When you log into the iDRAC web interface as root/calvin, it warns you that you are using the default username/password and prompts you to change the password. I did so by generating a random password in my password manager and pasting it into the password field.

The problem? The password can contain at most 20 characters, a limitation that is not obvious from the web interface. The password field on the iDRAC web interface truncates the password at 20 characters, and so I submitted a partial password. Then later, when I attempting to log it using the password saved in my password manager, it didn’t match. (For reasons that aren’t clear to me, submitting just the first 20 characters of the password saved in the password manager did not work either.)

I figured I was stuck and would have to go to the data center, reboot the server, and boot into the Lifecycle Controller in order to reset the iDRAC password. But I thought I’d see what I could do via ipmitool first.

From Configuring DRAC with ipmitool and ipmitool Cheatsheet:

Reset BMC/DRAC to default:

$ sudo ipmitool mc reset cold

The command was successful, but that did not reset the password for me.

From Resetting the BMC:

…you can reset the BMC to factory defaults with IPMICFG or ipmitool. Be aware that this will wipe any existing settings on the BMC that you may have set from the web interface, but excludes network settings.

# ipmitool raw 0x3c 0x40

But that did not work for me, and produced an error code. I spent some time trying to determine what the various raw hex values for ipmi meant, but that was not productive.

Eventually though I did hit upon an ipmitool command that worked:

$ sudo ipmitool user list 1
ID  Name	     Callin  Link Auth	IPMI Msg   Channel Priv Limit
1                    true    false      false      NO ACCESS
2   superuser        true    true       true       ADMINISTRATOR
3                    true    false      false      NO ACCESS
etc.

The username I configured corresponds with ID 2, so then I used ipmitool to set the password for that user:

$ sudo ipmitool user set password 2

I was prompted to enter the password, which I was then able to use to log in to the iDRAC web interface.

Using ipmitool to configure Dell iDRAC

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 ipmitool

I 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 directory

I checked and found that the path listed does exist:

$ ls /dev/ipmi*
/dev/ipmi0

Then 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 192.168.100.254

I 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.