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Joshua_Giles | 1 Jun 2003 23:24
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RE: Monitoring a Dell server

John,

Sorry about the late response...

You should be able to get away with some trimmed down version of OMSA.  I.E.
just use the dcstor32d and dcsnmp32d daemons in conjunction with the esm.o
module.  The problem is you will not be able to set SNMP information only
get values.  Dell has some proprietary way of setting their SNMP information
(securely).  I'm fighting to do away with this current implementation and
use the v3 standard.  

I've written a small paper about something similar to what you're asking:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/power_ps1q03-giles.htm

Also, check out Matt Domsch's web page as it has lots of useful info on this
subject:
http://www.domsch.com/linux/

-----Original Message-----
From: John Plate [mailto:plate <at> infotek.dk] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 3:00 AM
To: Giles, Joshua
Subject: Monitoring a Dell server

Hi Joshua

Some time ago I had to give up monitoring the hardward on our Dell servers
(small Intel based servers). The Dell software was for RedHat only. We use
Debian Linux.
(Continue reading)

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Anthony Porcano | 2 Jun 2003 04:52

RE: System Crashes Persist

Thanks, your feedback is really appreciated. Might be something with
PAE, but it seems unlikely to me. I'll post back if I make any headway
on this. 

Thanks,
 Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-admin <at> dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-admin <at> dell.com] On Behalf Of Marcmo <at> foxriver.com
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 9:50 AM
To: linux-poweredge <at> dell.com
Cc: anthony_porcano <at> kaplan.com
Subject: Re: System Crashes Persist
Importance: Low

FWIW...

I'm running pretty much the same setup ( only 4 GB RAM ) and I haven't
seen anything like this. I'm running OMSA and I'm using BASP Teaming.
I've got two of these servers which are clustered in an active-passive
setup for Oracle 9i (not RAC).  I'm running 2.4.9-e.9smp and I have a
couple of Qlogic Fibre cards in each server which are directly attached
to an EMC CX600.

HTH,

Marc Mondragon

Fox River Financial Resources/Ritchie Capital Investments, Ltd.
(Continue reading)

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Douglas Gilbert | 2 Jun 2003 06:32

Re: smartmontools

Drew Smith wrote [2002-11-14]:
 > So I downloaded the utilities and tested them
 > on a laptop and on a local machine, both with
 > IDE drives.  Nice!  Works as advertised, and
 > gives a pile of very useful information!  So,
 > I figured I'd deploy it on all my machines...
 > but first, a final test.
 >
 > Screw the long story.  DO NOT TRY THIS PACKAGE
 > on Dell servers using AACRAID controllers!  I've
 > got a guy on the way over to the colocation
 > facility now, to reboot the Dell 2550 machine which
 > appears to be hung solid.
....
 > issuing 'smartctl -c /dev/sda' locked the system *solid*.

Drew,
Since that time the scsi transport part of smartmontools
has been rewritten. Interestingly the "-c" switch [show
capabilities] does not do anything on SCSI devices in
recent versions (and most likely didn't when you tried
it either). Perhaps the previous smartctl command caused
the problem or it was "guilt by association".

Anyway, could you or someone else with this hardware
try a recent version smartmontools (found at
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net ). Debug output
showing the issued SCSI commands and their responses
can be seen by adding "-r ioctl,2" to the smartctl
command line. To see everything that is available
(Continue reading)

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Lukas Kubin | 2 Jun 2003 12:21
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RE: Monitoring a Dell server


Dell doesn't support anything else (in the Linux world) than RH. That's
the main point. Nobody knows why they chose RedHat only for servers, but
its their decision.
Before buying Dell servers we also thought there must be a way how to
make the management utilities work even if they are packaged for RedHat.
Don't believe its that easy.
Matt Domsch's page tries to help admins of other distributions but soon
you'll find its not worth of wasting your time. Some of mentioned files
are missing on the CDs, some links cannot be accessed from non-US sites.
You cannot change default password of DRAC card without having RedHat or
Windows on server and so everybody with access to the IP address of the
card can turn off your server.
If there is a solution for anything I've mentioned above, then I
appologize for what I wrote and will appreciate if you place it in this
list.

lukas

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003 Joshua_Giles <at> dell.com wrote:

> John,
>
> Sorry about the late response...
>
> You should be able to get away with some trimmed down version of OMSA.  I.E.
> just use the dcstor32d and dcsnmp32d daemons in conjunction with the esm.o
> module.  The problem is you will not be able to set SNMP information only
> get values.  Dell has some proprietary way of setting their SNMP information
> (securely).  I'm fighting to do away with this current implementation and
(Continue reading)

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Bruce Allen | 2 Jun 2003 13:50
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Re: smartmontools

Drew,

I was also wondering about this, and also meant to ask you also if it
might be possible to check a recent version of the code.  We'd be very
grateful if you could.

Cheers,
	Bruce

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Douglas Gilbert wrote:

> Drew Smith wrote [2002-11-14]:
>  > So I downloaded the utilities and tested them
>  > on a laptop and on a local machine, both with
>  > IDE drives.  Nice!  Works as advertised, and
>  > gives a pile of very useful information!  So,
>  > I figured I'd deploy it on all my machines...
>  > but first, a final test.
>  >
>  > Screw the long story.  DO NOT TRY THIS PACKAGE
>  > on Dell servers using AACRAID controllers!  I've
>  > got a guy on the way over to the colocation
>  > facility now, to reboot the Dell 2550 machine which
>  > appears to be hung solid.
> ....
>  > issuing 'smartctl -c /dev/sda' locked the system *solid*.
> 
> Drew,
> Since that time the scsi transport part of smartmontools
> has been rewritten. Interestingly the "-c" switch [show
(Continue reading)

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Ulrich Hochholdinger | 2 Jun 2003 14:28
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Re: Monitoring a Dell server

Hi,
On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 12:21:17PM +0200, Lukas Kubin wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Dell doesn't support anything else (in the Linux world) than RH. That's
> the main point. Nobody knows why they chose RedHat only for servers, but
> its their decision.
That's shurely a problem, but my opinion is that Linux is Linux
regardless of the distribution you use. So it's normaly possible to run
applications which are packaged for a special distribution on every
other distribution, but sometimes it's a bit tricky. I havent found an
application which will not run on my debian system till now.

> Before buying Dell servers we also thought there must be a way how to
> make the management utilities work even if they are packaged for RedHat.
> Don't believe its that easy.
Ok, that has been a trickier part (here for debian...). And I only
wanted the commandline-utility.
First build, install and start the esm.o kernel Module and the additional
daemons. Description for building found on matt's homepage:
http://www.domsch.com/linux/openmanage-contrib/debian/
(btw the kernel-sources are only searched in /usr/src/linux ...)
The next step is to convert the rpm-package for racadm which is found in
the big OMSA - tar-file with this program it's possible to change values
on the rac i.e the passwd. I used alien for this, and extracted the
produced debian-package by hand sorted a bit around and repackaged it
again :)

To get racadm to work is a bit more complex. It's a binary which calls redhat
(Continue reading)

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Ed Griffin | 2 Jun 2003 15:34
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Minimized OMSA install...

Maybe this has been discussed, maybe not.  And granted I haven't tried 
with the most recent version of OMSA (1.4?).  But basically I want to 
install just the portion of the software to enable the OS to see the 
ERA/DRACIII card.  I am also assuming this is what is neccesary to 
enable the graceful shutdown option of the ERA.  Please correct me if I 
am wrong.  Could someone let me know which packages are neccessary for 
this?  I would prefer to do this as an RPM install, that way I can 
script it rather than run a Java console on 20+ systems.  

Thanks.

--Ed

--

-- 
*****************************************************************
Ed Griffin
Assistant Network/System Administrator
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Weather Sensing Group
(781) 981-2871
mailto:edg <at> ll.mit.edu
*****************************************************************


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Colm MacCarthaigh | 2 Jun 2003 15:41
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Re: Monitoring a Dell server

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 12:21:17PM +0200, Lukas Kubin wrote:
> Dell doesn't support anything else (in the Linux world) than RH. That's
> the main point. Nobody knows why they chose RedHat only for servers, but
> its their decision.

Dell is a premier RedHat partner, so it's no great surprise. Personally
I have no problem with Dell only supporting RH on the Linux line.

After all their support costs would be enourmous if they had to deal
with the support requirements of dealing with Debian, Mandrake, SuSe,
flavour-of-the-month, and there are no off-the-shelf support partners
they can go to with that.

My problem, is that for some bizarre reason I cannot contemplate, Dell
have chosen not to provide the source for their Open Manage software.
Making it about as "Open" as fort-knox.

I have two main problems with that. Problem one is that I cannot review
the software, parts of this stuff are network accessible, other parts
go in the kernel, and it all has the power to shutdown my machines,
or reboot them on demand. I have the source for everything else on my
machine, and I have a distinct dislike of using something I cannot review
for such a sensitive application.

Problem two, is that there are people like me, who are prepared to invest
our time making Dell software better at zero cost to Dell. There are
people ready and willing to produce versions that work on other Linux
distros out of the box, they are people ready and willing to produce
versions that don't use SNMP at all, there are people ready and willing
to review the source, fix problems and push back to the community. Bottom
(Continue reading)

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Steve_Boley | 2 Jun 2003 16:07
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RE: System Crashes Persist

Get the latest versions of broadcom drivers and basp out and available and
try them.  The family ver is 6.1 and the driver is 6.0.2 or something like
that.  Some older ver of bcom modules have not been too friendly with large
amounts of ram.
Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Porcano [mailto:aporcano <at> kaplan.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 9:52 PM
To: Marcmo <at> foxriver.com; linux-poweredge <at> exchange.dell.com
Cc: anthony_porcano <at> kaplan.com
Subject: RE: System Crashes Persist

Thanks, your feedback is really appreciated. Might be something with
PAE, but it seems unlikely to me. I'll post back if I make any headway
on this. 

Thanks,
 Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-admin <at> dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-admin <at> dell.com] On Behalf Of Marcmo <at> foxriver.com
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 9:50 AM
To: linux-poweredge <at> dell.com
Cc: anthony_porcano <at> kaplan.com
Subject: Re: System Crashes Persist
Importance: Low

FWIW...
(Continue reading)

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Lukas Kubin | 2 Jun 2003 16:10
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Re: Monitoring a Dell server


Thank you very much for your answers. May I ask you to send me your .debs
(especially those to make racadm work) or to place them somewhere? Maybe
as a link from Matt Domsch's page?

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Ulrich Hochholdinger wrote:

> Hi,
> On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 12:21:17PM +0200, Lukas Kubin wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Dell doesn't support anything else (in the Linux world) than RH. That's
> > the main point. Nobody knows why they chose RedHat only for servers, but
> > its their decision.
> That's shurely a problem, but my opinion is that Linux is Linux
> regardless of the distribution you use. So it's normaly possible to run
> applications which are packaged for a special distribution on every
> other distribution, but sometimes it's a bit tricky. I havent found an
> application which will not run on my debian system till now.

That's my opinion too. Dell was the one who placed the equal sign between
RedHat and Linux. Publishing the drivers as open-source tarballs would
help tons of administrators who don't believe RedHat is appropriate
distribution for servers.
I agree RH packages can be converted. But why such non-systematic
solution? Dell claims they support Linux so I expect they support Linux.

> For me this site was a great source of information. Keep up this great
> work Matt...
(Continue reading)

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Gmane