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..
This is something which took me quite a while to figure out, but it can be done fairly easily in a few minutes. This guide will install Dell OMSA and use omreport to view the status of the RAID.
First, add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara
Then, if you try ‘apt-get update’, you will get a key error, so do the following:
wget -O – http://ftp.sara.nl/debian_sara.asc | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install dellomsa
To use omreport, you need to install libstdc++5 to fix the dependancy problems:
For 32 bit systems:
cd /tmp/
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
For 64 bit systems (you will need the 32 bit version as well):
cd /tmp/
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb -x libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb ./extracts
cp ./extracts/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/
rm -rf ./extracts
Now start the dataeng service:
/etc/init.d/dataeng start
And you should be able to view information about the RAID using omreport:
omreport system summary
omreport storage connector controller=0
omreport storage pdisk controller=0
omreport storage vdisk controller=0
You can then make a simple shell/php/perl script cron which checks the status of the RAID every x minutes and notifies you of any problems.
