Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Someone on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list has written a script that uses SOAP calls to query dell's warranty site . I'm sure it's helpful to someone else to know this.

Dell TechCenter has released a LiveDVD image with OMSA to update firmware and BIOS on Dell hardware using a CentOS Linux distro.

Dell's released the latest version of OpenManage 6.5.1 . It provides drivers, BIOS and firmware updates from Linux when running Dell PowerEdge hardware.

The kind people of the German university of Göttingen have mirrored the Dell OMSA hardware and firmware repo for us. This way, we have a European mirror available that is also much faster than Dell's native server.

Dell has released version 6.5 of their OpenManage repository with firmware and BIOS updates as well as Linux monitoring of hardware found in Dell servers.

Dell's OMSA is great for maintaining and updating a Dell server's firmware, if it works... Dell does a great job so far, but sometimes little quirks mess up small parts and suddenly OMSA will update all or nothing or only a few and then call it quits. pjwelsh has written a handy little summary of the various ways with which you can try to still get working, albeit manually: Failed BIOS update on Dell R710 with CentOS 5.5 solved! (Worked around, really)

Dell Community notified us that you can now install Ubuntu Server Edition on its servers. While they won't factory-install it and Dell support itself will not support it, Dell has worked with Canonical for the past 2 years to support it. Canonical will be offering support for Ubuntu on Dell servers. To make support easier, Dell has built a native .deb package of OMSA 6.3 on Ubuntu 9.10.

Where I had great difficulties trying to get OMSA to install let alone work in Oracle's Enterprise Linux 4 (u5 and above), I am happy to report that I got it working out-of-the-box after an install of my custom 5u3 image, following the instructions on the OMSA Repository Wiki . A simple http proxy setting, the wget boot strap line to configure yum and the dependencies and I was in business! Excellent work, Dell!

Got a handy little reference on the PowerEdge Linux mailing list over at Dell. Someone mentioned the location of the OMSA MIB files that define what can be monitored, measured, etc. on a Dell server using IPMI. I was wondering where these MIBs were located because I might be able to use them myself for other purposes on that hardware. Anyway, the MIBs for OMSA /opt/dell/srvadmin/sm/mibs/dcstorag.mib

Dell has released OMSA 6.0.2 for monitoring and remotely managing Dell PowerEdge servers that run Linux. Plugins for Nagios, MOM and others exist, so you can tie your Linux servers to most corporate tools.

Wouldn't it be great if you could use the LCD on a Dell PowerEdge to display the names of the VMs running on it? You may never to know where a VM actually, but if you do, you usually need it badly. Well Nickapedia wrote the script and the HOWTO for you: Dell Server LCD Update Script . It uses Dell OMSA on ESX and IPMI to get access to the VM names and then outputs these on the LCD. Brilliant! See video on YouTube ! BTW: won't work on ESXi because OMSA is not supported there.

HPC Community - Systems Management : "The Dell OpenManage Nagios Plug-in is a freely available, open source plug-in for the Nagios network monitor. By harnessing Dell OpenManage (OMSA), the plug-in provides the ability to monitor the overall health of supported Dell hardware models, all via the Nagios interface. Additionally, the Nagios notification mechanism may be used to provide alerts regarding system state based upon the information reported by the Dell OpenManage Nagios Plug-in."

Someone on the Dell mailing list was kind enough to point that although OMSA (OpenManage) on Ubuntu is not supported by Dell, the SARA institute in the Netherlands has a couple of OMSA Debian packages for Ubuntu ready for use. Check their site !

Just read a neat trick you can perform with Dell's OMSA software ... You can put the load average of your PowerEdge 2950 into the LCD screen of the server. That way it'll show how busy it is at a glance. First you'll need to figure out how many characters the LCD screen is wide. But let's say it can hold 20 characters, maximum. Then you convert the load average to a single digit using mod 20. Add the remainder of characters into the LCD. Say you have a remainder of 7: omconfig chassis frontpanel config=custom lcdindex=1 text="=======" Cool! BTW, this wasn't mine, I got it from the PowerEdge mailing list! Recommended!

The mailing list noted yesterday that Dell OMSA 5.5 is being tested. "We now have OMSA 5.5 available for testing in the Dell hardware repository. As of OMSA 5.5, yum is now an official distribution method. Due to this, 5.5 will soon move to the 'latest' repo. Please report back any failures or successes. To test the new repository, you can now go directly to http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/OMSA_5.5/ , and follow the instructions. With the new repository tools, you will be able to stay on a specific version of the repository, or stay up to date with the latest packages, by going to the appropriate folder (e.g. 'OMSA_5.5' or 'latest') and bootstrapping the repository."

I have been struggling with Dell's OpenManage Server Management a bit lately. Mainly because other people asked me to try it and gave me wrong links to information. So I'll clarify it here, for those getting started as well, and hope it helps someone. Dell Server Management has a lot (!) of components and you don't really need all (or any) of them. But they can be helpful. We'll use it for Server Management , mainly to monitor our PowerEdge 2950 servers but also (hopefully) to unify BIOS settings and DRAC configurations remotely. That's why we need OpenManage Server Administration (OMSA) . OMSA consists of a number of things: - OMSA Server - OMSA Managed Node - OMSA ITA (IT Assistance) You'll only need one server (maybe two for fail-over and redundancy). The easiest way to install the server is add a yum/up2date repo from Dell. but I had trouble finding the "OMSA agent" or "OMSA client" that I'd install on all servers to be monitored by...

Just getting started using Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on our Oracle Linux platform. There are some confusing instructions going around so it's not immediately clear what to do, hence my blogging here. :) There is a site on Dell - Hardware Monitoring , as well as a wiki with instruction on how to setup their OMSA tooling using yum or up2date. [update]My first update for their instructions: be sure your server has Internet access, as most servers will use a proxy or so. use export http_proxy=http://yourproxy.example.com:port to configure it just for the session, and setup up2date to use an HTTP proxy by editing the settings in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date .