We recently got some Dell Poweredge R410 servers, and I thought it would be quite useful to change the LCD text to something meaningful. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bit more of a pain than I was expecting, but I have it working, and a PHP script to update the display.

First, you’ll need to go into the BIOS and change the display to ‘custom’.

The updates will be done using ‘ipmitool’, so we need to install it and add the necessary modules to /etc/modules

apt-get install ipmitool
echo “ipmi_devintf” >> /etc/modules
echo “ipmi_si” >> /etc/modules
echo “ipmi_msghandler” >> /etc/modules

You should now be able to view the contents of the LCD by running:

ipmitool delloem lcd

I didn’t get anywhere trying to write new values to the LCD using the delloem command, so resorted to sending raw commands to ipmitool.

I wrote the following php script, which can be used by first making it executable, then running it from the shell

chmod +x updateLCD.php
./updateLCD.php “test string”

The php script is pretty simple and can be found here

It’s also fairly easy to extend this script to update the LCD to display stats such as disk usage, server load, cpu usage etc..