[OpenIndiana-discuss] Problem with Dell iDRAC

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Kris Henriksson [mailto:kth48 at cornell.edu]
> 
> I've been having a long-standing issue with using the iDRAC on my
> server with OpenIndiana, and I thought before giving up completely, I
> could try asking the mailing list. The problem is that the iDRAC is
> completely inaccessible while OpenIndiana is running.
> 
> The system is a Dell PowerEdge T610, with Dell iDRAC 6 Express. If I
> run Linux on it, the iDRAC can be accessed just fine, and before
> OpenIndiana has started booting, I can access it, but with OI running
> it is inaccessible. The DRAC shares a physical network port with the
> OS, but has a separate MAC address and independent network traffic.

I've seen that before.

Got over it...  I forget precisely how ...  I think I had to go into BIOS, and "disable" the first NIC.  This makes it inaccessible to the OS, but not inaccessible to the iDRAC.  Then, obviously, connect two separate ethernet cables.  One for the management interface, and one for the OS.

Also, if you ping monitor the OS and the iDRAC...  It is normal to see the iDRAC disappear at certain moments during the boot process.  So don't assume it's failed the moment ping begins to fail.  Wait for the OS to come up completely, and perhaps a minute longer.

Oh yeah ...

This might be separate, but the built-in broadcom NIC was never stable in solaris 10 / opensolaris.  Symptom was a weird sort of black-screen lockup while still responding to ping, which occurred approx once a week.  We made this problem go away by buying an add-on Intel server NIC.  So it's distinctly possible, that the actual iDRAC solution is to "disable" both the broadcom ethernets in BIOS (use only by iDRAC) and only use the Intel NIC in the OS.