Tag: Dell

Dell PowerEdge 1855, DRAC/MC, firmware updates, telnet and csr’s

Christian Leave a comment

Today I played a bit with our PE Chassis, or more specifically the DRAC/MC (remote management console). One of the things I’ve been experiencing was that the DRAC/MC was rather slow when browsing on the web interface (as in waiting a minute for the jnlp for the KVM to download). So I went ahead, fired up net-misc/atftp on my notebook, put the firmware update provided by Dell in the TFTPROOT and executed this in my telnet session on the DRAC/MC:

You may ask now, wtf does he use telnet for on that box ? It’s as simple as Dell isn’t providing anything else to use, the switches come w/ ssh, but not the management console. Only way to get ssh is to buy a new one, which is like 500 EUR.

Waited a few minutes impatiently for the DRAC/MC to come back up (and it finally came back up). The good thing is, the DRAC/MC is now at least a bit faster (at least I feel its a bit faster) and we’re up at mgmt-1.4.2.

Now, since we are a member of the DFN CA, we are able to generate signed certificates (at least Internet Explorer recognizes it through the DTAG Root certificate – which Mozilla products sadly don’t have by default). For that I need a 2048 bit PCKS#10 (or CSR), which I tried to squash out of the DRAC/MC. But what the hell ❓

The DRAC/MC only gives me a 1024 bit one without the possibility to choose what kind of CSR I want to generate … 😡

Shibboleth (WTF is that?)

Christian Leave a comment

OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days – oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin.

My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term – it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin).

Yesterday was quite amazing workwise, we lifted the 75kg Blade Chassis into the rack (*yuck* there was a time I was completely against Dell stuff, but recently that has changed), plugged all four C22 plugs into the rack’s PDU’s and into the chassis, patched the management interface (which is *waaay* to slow for a dedicated management daughter board) and for the first time started the chassis. *ugh* That scared me .. that wasn’t noise like a xSeries or any other rack-based server we have around, more like a starting airplane. You can literally stand in behind of the chassis, and get your hairs dried (if you need to). So I looked at the blades together with my co-worker and we figured, that they don’t have any coolers anymore, they are just using the cooling the chassis provides.

Another surprise awaited us, when we thought, we could use the integrated switch to provide network for both integrated network cards (Broadcome NetExtreme II). *sigh* You need two seperate switches to serve two network cards, even if you only have two blades in the chassis (which provides space for 10 blades). *sigh* That really sucks, but its the same with the FC stuff …

So, we are waiting yet again for Dell to make us an offer, and on top of that, the sales representative doesn’t have the slightest idea if the FC passthrough module includes SFP’s or not … *yuck*

I must say, I’m impressed by the Dell hardware, but I’m really disappointed by their sales representative.