Dell's RAC support under Linux == drek

Back in 2007 I wrote draft of blog post about semi-working solution for remote console on Dell's servers. I never finished it, but now I got a few more Dell servers and I'm not impressed. Linux support is even worse. Drek is shit in Croatian, btw.

First, update your RAC to latest firmware. It's a challenging task on Dell's web (I did it three times allready and still I can't remember procedure, so I'm documenting it here): search for drac 4 firmware (DRAC 4/I) and select newest version available (due to ranking sorting this can be hard task, select date sort). If you have DRAC 5, searching over Dell's site isn't much help. But, you can hop directly to ftp site and select file with name f_drac5*.exe.

Now download hard-drive format (it's self-extracting zip) and extract firmware:
dpavlin@t61p:~/Downloads/dell/2800$ unzip f_0603v17en_d4.exe 
Archive:  f_0603v17en_d4.exe
  inflating: firmimg.dm1             

dpavlin@t61p:~/Downloads/dell/2900$ unzip f_drac5v145_A00.exe 
Archive:  f_drac5v145_A00.exe
  inflating: firmimg.d5              
Upload firmimg.* via web interface (if you have really old version of RAC, you might need IE to do this, but recent versions from last year or two work also with Firefox. Firmware update doesn't work with Google Chrome). This is just the beginning of Internet Explorer dependencies, so get used to it.

Good idea is to ping your DRAC while uploading firmware. While flash is programming, you will get interruption in ICMP echo reply, but that's not a reason for worry. It will come back.

After all that, you still won't get Linux support. At least not with recent Firefox. Lousy work, Dell! How are you accessing your Dell servers from Linux?