IPMI and the Dell PowerEdge – Part the Second

Setting up IPMI via the DRAC

We’ll walk through the steps to set up the server for monitoring via IPMI using the DRAC. It is supposedly possible to do this without the DRAC, but I haven’t had a reason to try to do that yet.  

1. Log in the DRAC (ex: https://<RAC IP Address>/ )
2. Once logged in (see below) choose the “Remote Access” option
    
3. Choose the “Configuration” tab
    
4. This should take you to the “Network Configuration” page.
5. Scroll down to the IPMI LAN Settings section and ensure the “Enable IPMI over LAN” option is checked. If it is not, check it and click the “Apply Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

   You can also change the Privilege Level Limit setting (i.e. restricting the kinds of actions that can be executed. Options are Administrator, Operator and User) I’ve left this one at Administrator because I will be limiting the user account we set up. However you also need to be aware that ipmitool by default wants to connect with Admin privileges but we can override this on the command line.

   You can also set the encryption key but we won’t be using this with ipmitool because there appears to be an issue with entering it in an easy fashion.

6. Back up at the top (the “Configuration” tab) choose “Users”
7. Click on the number representing one of the “Disabled” user accounts. We’ll pick #4.

   Check the box to enable this user. Enter the user name and password. Under the User Privileges sections set the “Maximum LAN User Privilege Granted” to “User”. Under the DRAC settings configure as you wish if you want this account to be able to manage the DRAC or just leave it empty. The completed form looks like:

   

8. Click the “Apply Changes” button at the bottom of the screen.
   That’s it. Our user is now set up for IPMI access. Using ipmitool will follow in another post.