Life of a Geek Admin

The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Life of a Geek Admin - The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Tag Archives: Dell

Using Dell racadm on RedHat / CentOS

Recently have had the pleasure of using part of the the Dell Server Administrator tools to manage their hardware on RHEL 5 and 6 servers. The servers had been built and shipped out but the DRAC’s were un-configured. With RACADM command this is not an issue and can be done with command line tools and the use of configuration files. This is assuming the Server Admin tools have been installed on the system. If they have not, all is not lost.

All you need to do is download OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-LX-7.0.0-4614_A00.tar.gz or the latest from Dell’s support site, untar it and run linux/supportscripts/srvadmin-install.sh. The screen will change and you will be presented with installation options. Enter 5 and press enter, when you are returned back press “I” and the installation will begin. Once the installation has completed you will be prompted to start the services, press Y and complete the installation.

Now we can set a few parameters such as:

  • root password
  • DRAC nic config
  • Rac DNS servers
  • DRAC DNS Domain
  • DNS Rac name

So let’s get started setting them up! In the examples below I am ssh into the servers running the commands.

Set the password for the drac root user using racadm command.
# racadm config -g cfgUserAdmin -o cfgUserAdminPassword -i 2 "newpassword"

Set DRAC nic
# racadm setniccfg -s 192.168.1.50 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1

Get the current nic config
# racadm getniccfg

NIC Enabled     = 1
DHCP Enabled    = 0
IP Address      = 192.168.1.50
Subnet Mask     = 255.255.255.0
Gateway         = 192.168.1.1
Set DNS servers
# racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking -o cfgDNSServer1 192.168.1.200
# racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking -o cfgDNSServer2 192.168.1.201

Set DNS Rac Name
# racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking -o cfgDNSRacName myserver

Set DRAC DNS Domain
# racadm config -g cfgLanNetworking -o cfgDNSDomainName drac.mydomain.com

This is just a small piece of what you can do with racadm command. If you want to export the current settings to a file this can be done with getconfig sub-command.

# racadm getconfig –f config.txt

Now you can use this as a template and make changes to use on other systems to set DRAC’s. This also is a good way to see all the settings and parameter names for making more command line changes. Once you have made the changes you can copy the file to the server and use:

# racadm config -f config.txt

and the settings will be imported into the system.

Other useful commands are:

Reset DRAC configuration to factory defaults
# racadm racresetcfg

power off / power on / reboot
# racadm serveraction [powerdown|powerup|powercycle]

View system event log (this will let you see why the orange light is blinking)
# racadm getsel

Clear system event log (this will clear the blinking orange light)
# racadm clear

Get service tag
# racadm getsvctag

Get current system information
# racadm getsysinfo

Hope this helps you to manage your Dell hardware as it does for me!

 

Using Dell SUU on RHEL 64 Bit

Part of many systems admins jobs is to update firmware and drivers on the servers. This is needed to keep systems stable and avoid nasty crashes and OS incompatibilities.

The best time is when you build the system and also when you can get the time when you can take the system offline to give it much needed patches.

Dell provides a downloadable DVD ISO for their Server Update Utility (SUU), which runs on Windows  and Linux systems. It can be downloaded from support.dell.com and search for drivers. After you enter your server’s Service Tag, you will have a list of available downloads. Expand the + Systems Management tree, and click Download Now for the Dell DVD ISO – Dell Server Updates.

There is an issue with RedHat 64 bit systems fail to run SUU when it is collecting inventory to determine what to update. This is due to the fact that SUU requires compat-libstdc++-33.i686 which is not installed by default. To fix the issue just install the following packages.

yum -y install glibc.i686 compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 zlib.i686 libxml2.i686 libXp.i686 libXtst.i686 ncurses-libs pam.i686 procmail

From this point the tool is simple. Insert and mount the DVD with the updates and SUU.

mount /dev/dvd /mnt

Change to the directory and use the -c parameter to see what updates are applicable.

./suu -c

Now use -u to install the updates. This will take time so you can move on to other items like browsing the Internet for cool blogs like this one!!!.

./suu -u

Once the updates have finished un-mount your DVD and reboot.

Dell offers other products to manage and automate updates and alerts with IT Assistant which I will cover in future posts!

Enable Virtualization on Dell Optiplex 755 to run Oracle VirtualBox 4

Recently I ran into an issue when working on creating a test cluster environment for Windows 2008 R2 with Oracle VirtualBox running on Fedora 16 64 bit on a Dell Optiplex 755.

The issue was VirtualBox would complain about VT-x/AMD-V not being enabled and would stop the VM from loading. After doing some digging around found that there is a specific setting in the BIOS to enable what is needed to enable the settings for 64 bit  VM’s to run. These changes will also work in enabling Hyper-V to run properly on Windows systems.

To fix this, boot the computer and press F2 to enter the BIOS.

In the BIOS you need to change the following settings

Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Save and exit the BIOS, then power the computer down. it is important that the system be powered down.

After the system was powered up, the VM started properly with 64 bit support.

Clearing Dell Logs

Ran into a reoccurring issue with Dell servers showing amber lights on the systems. When using Dell Server Administrator to research the errors it was found the Hardware logs were full. The only way we know how to get rid of the alert and clear the logs was by using Dell Server Administrator interface and manually clearing the log. This got me thinking on how can we automate this to occur manually on a monthly basis using a scheduled task.

With a bit of digging on Dell’s support site I came across Dell Server Administrator 6.5 Command Line PDF.

OpenManage Server Administrator supports:

  • Displaying and configuring BIOS settings for all supported platforms
  • Latest version of vendor libraries
  • Configuring boot order and adding or removing devices from the boot list using CLI
  • SHA 256 certificate authentication
  • Installing OMSA on Linux with specific packages, according to its distribution, version, or architecture
  • Trusted Cryptographic Module (TCM)
  • Power management of physical disks attached to the controller
  • Writing the encryption parameters of the controller
  • Displaying vFlash type and available size in vFlash media details
  • Displaying Network Interface Controller (NIC) Team interface properties in omreport chassis command
  • Displaying slot details in omreport controller command

For this post I am only addressing the omconfig command to clear the logs to address the issue. Since finding the command and the capabilities I will be looking at automating more and configuring servers.

To get more information on the command and the syntax open a command prompt and type omconfig /? which will display command level 1. Expand the help by typing omconfig system /? for help on the next command level.

C:\>omconfig /?

omconfig Configures component properties.

The available command(s) are:

Command Description
about Product and version properties.
preferences Set system preferences.
system Set system properties.
chassis Set chassis component properties.
storage Set storage component properties.

Usage: omconfig [name=value...] ... [option...]

Valid command line options are:

-? Print available command(s) or command help.
-fmt Format for output results, default is lst.
Where: lst List format.
xml Raw XML format.
-outc Redirect output to file, delete old if exists.
OR
-outa Redirect output to file, append to old if exists.
OR
Output may also be redirected using Operating System facilities (e.g. |more).

The command 2 piece that holds logs is system. The three logs Hardware (esmlog), Alerts (alertlog) and Command (cmdlog) are contained within this command reference. Running omconfig system esmlog /?  shows action=clear as a valid parameter for clearing the log. This holds true to the other two logs, so our end command is:

omconfig system esmlog action=clear
omconfig system alertlog action=clear
omconfig system cmdlog action=clear

To complete the automation take the commands and open Notepad or your favorite editor and save it in a location as a cmd file. Create a scheduled task to run the cmd file on a monthly basis and you will have one less amber light.

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