Dell iDRAC Network Configuration with Linux

To begin with, iDRAC is definately not my favourite lights-out management interface.

In any case, I was recently needing to have console access on a remote Dell PowerEdge R610 server (located on a different country). When I attempted to log in to its iDRAC using the documented (from the engineer that did the initial installation) IP address I got this:



Unfortunately, after a couple of minutes of searching here and there I realized that the iDRAC interface was not configured at all!

So, the obvious solution was to find a local engineer with physical access to the server in order to login using the rack’s KVM and during boot time press CTRL+E key combination…




And quickly get the iDRAC configuration screen…



However, like most enterprise class products, iDRAC provides operating system level utilities to do all the administration remotely. In Dell’s case, the tool we are looking for is called ‘racadm’ as part of Dell OpenManage Server Administration (OMSA) suite. Now, below you can see how simple is to do the network configuration of the iDRAC interface using this tool…

[root@somewhere ~]# racadm setniccfg -s XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX 255.255.255.0 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Static IP configuration enabled and modified successfully
[root@somewhere ~]#

The IP addresses were intentionally masked with ‘X’. The first argument is the IP address we want for the iDRAC interface, the second is its subnet mask and the last one its default gateway IP address.

Verify that your changes actually took effect using the following command.

[root@somewhere ~]# racadm getniccfg

IPv4 settings:
NIC Enabled     = 1
IPv4 Enabled    = 1
DHCP Enabled    = 0
IP Address      = XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX 
Subnet Mask     = 255.255.255.0
Gateway         = XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX 

IPv6 settings:
IPv6 Enabled       = 0
DHCP6 Enabled      = 1
IP Address 1       = ::
Gateway            = ::
Link Local Address = ::
IP Address 2       = ::
IP Address 3       = ::
IP Address 4       = ::
IP Address 5       = ::
IP Address 6       = ::
IP Address 7       = ::
IP Address 8       = ::
IP Address 9       = ::
IP Address 10      = ::
IP Address 11      = ::
IP Address 12      = ::
IP Address 13      = ::
IP Address 14      = ::
IP Address 15      = ::

LOM Status:
NIC Selection   = Dedicated
Link Detected   = Yes
Speed           = 100Mb/s
Duplex Mode     = Full Duplex
[root@somewhere ~]#

Dell’s ‘racadm’ has options to do almost any iDRAC related configuration but in my case this was sufficient to login to its web interface and continue my work from there…



Once again this something very simple but I hope that it will help other users who faced the same problem.

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