iDRAC

Fix WinRM Client Issues

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My team manages a lot of Dell hardware. Over the years we’ve run into situations where we have to replace the system board on a host. The system board’s management interface, iDRAC, has a license key on it, and when you replace the system board it’s helpful if you can export the license key ahead of time. That way you can reimport it again easily without getting your sales team involved to reissue a key. Unfortunately sometimes that’s not possible, such as when the iDRAC management interface is what died (my case today). Turns out that Dell has the “Dell EMC License Manager” (get it from support.dell.com under the Systems Management downloads for your hardware) which you can proactively take …

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Interesting Dell iDRAC Tricks

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Deploying a bunch of machines all at once? Know your way around for loops in shell scripts, or Excel enough to do some basic text functions & autofill? You, too, can set up a few hundred servers in one shot. Here’s some interesting things I’ve done in the recent past using the Dell iDRAC out-of-band hardware management controllers. You need to install the racadm utility on your Windows or Linux host. I’ll leave this up to you, but you probably want to look in the Dell Downloads for your server, under “Systems Management.” I recently found it as “Dell OpenManage DRAC Tools, includes Racadm” in 32- and 64-bit flavors. Basic Command The basic racadm command I’ll represent with $racadm from …

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New Java Security Settings: More Proof That Oracle Hates You

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I began the day yesterday updating to Java 7u51, after which absolutely none of my enterprise Java applications worked anymore. I could not reach the consoles of my Rackspace cloud servers. I could not open the iDRAC console on my Dell PowerEdge. They all exited with some error about the Permissions attribute not being set. Being the guy that I am I decided to search for the error. Turns out that 7u51 sneaks a major change in a point release: on the default Java security slider setting of “high” no applet may run if it’s self-signed, unsigned, or is missing the Permissions attribute. Unfortunately, that describes all enterprise software, at least all the current versions of things I’m using. This isn’t …

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