The DRAC card has several services bound on its dedicated IP; here is the list of the default ports and their usage:

• 22 Secure Shell
• 23 Telnet
• 80 HTTP
• 443 HTTPS
• 161 SNMP (UDP)
• 3668 Virtual Media server
• 5869 Remote racadm server
• 5900-5901 Console Redirection

This list can be useful, if you need to setup port forwarding, or firewall rules while working with DRAC cards. For more, check dell’s manuals.

A. Hardware solutions:

1. PePLink Balance 20L/200/300
2. Netgear FVX538
3. Linksys RV042/RV082
4. Xincom Twin WAN Router XC-DPG502
5. ZyXEL ZyWALL 35 UTM

B. Software solutions:

1. Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.org/
2. Endian: http://www.endian.com/en/community/

If you have a better experience on this we would love to hear your suggestions or previous experiences with such devices and your opinion on what is the best way to implement ISP failover and loadbalancing.

Since the DRAC card has its own IP separated from the one of the host server it is very common to assign for it a private IP; or even if it has a public IP it might be protected by a corporate firewall, making it very simple to connect from the corporate office, but not from outside. In such cases when you need to connect to the DRAC console from outside a solution is to tunnel over SSH your DRAC traffic.

In order for this to work you need to tunnel ports 443 (SSL) and and 5900,5901 (VNC). This can be achieved with openssh with a command like this:
ssh -L 443:dracip:443 -L 5900:dracip:5900 -L 5901:dracip:5901 -l user -N ssh_host
or similar from other ssh clients by mapping the respective ports.

If you would forward just 443, this will allow you to use the web interface of the DRAC card (and all its features, like power management, etc), but not the remote console redirection (5900,5901 are needed for the console to work).

After connecting the ssh tunnel you can just open in your local browser https://localhost/ and get the DRAC interface. The console redirection and it will work as expected.

Note: this solution has the limitation that it will work for only one DRAC console. You can tunnel over ssh multiple drac ips on port 443, like for ex:
- localhost:443 -> dracip1:443
- localhost:444 -> dracip2:443, etc.
but the remote console will require the ports 5900, 59001 and thus only one can work at the same time.

If you are running the DRAC console over a public IP, and you want to reach it from outside directly you will need to open in your firewall connections to the same ports TCP 443, 5900 and 5901.

• approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 clients were affected
• their own management servers, EV1Severs domain management, and SSL management; also their client management and communication tool ServerCommand was in the same situation;
• ev1servers.net nameservers and the H1 resolvers: 207.218.192.38 and 207.218.192.39 were down also (affecting other clients that might had those configured). Also the ones with the domain hosted on ev1 infrastructure, even if they had their server up were not functional because of dns problems.

At this time about 90% of the servers are up, but they are still working to bring up the rest.

So far, The Planet has been managing the situation as a whole quite well, by addressing the issues in a transparent and also timely manner. ThePlanet/Ev1 support team published updates during this period on their status page and also on their forum; also phone greetings recordings reported the status of the problem.

NOTE: as always when doing things like BIOS upgrade be extremely careful and don’t proceed with it if you are not sure what (or why) you are doing it. If something wrong happens and the BIOS update is broken it can make your system unusable. If unsure, check with your Dell support representative before doing this.

Ok, here is the summary of the actions needed:

• we need the libsmbios package installed
• we need to get the bios update file
• we will perform the update and reload the system for this to take place.

1. Install the libsmbios package.

This step is easy as it is packaged in the debian repository and we can install it with:

aptitude install libsmbios-bin libsmbios1 libsmbiosxml1

There are several binaries installed by libsmbios-bin:

dpkg -L libsmbios-bin
/.
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/sbin/activateCmosToken
/usr/sbin/ascii2enUS_scancode
/usr/sbin/assetTag
/usr/sbin/createUnitTestFiles
/usr/sbin/dellBiosUpdate
/usr/sbin/dellLcdBrightness
/usr/sbin/disable_console_redir
/usr/sbin/dumpCmos
/usr/sbin/dumpSmbios
/usr/sbin/getPasswordFormat
/usr/sbin/getSystemId
/usr/sbin/isCmosTokenActive
/usr/sbin/probes
/usr/sbin/propertyTag
/usr/sbin/serviceTag
/usr/sbin/smitest
/usr/sbin/stateByteCtl
/usr/sbin/sysid
/usr/sbin/tokenCtl
/usr/sbin/upBootCtl
/usr/sbin/verifySmiPassword
/usr/sbin/wakeupCtl

We will be using getSystemId to get the system ID and dellBiosUpdate to perform the actual update.

2. Download the BIOS update file

We can see in the Dell support site that there is a new bios update version, but the files are not in the format we need… We first need to find out the system id. For this we run getSystemID and the output in my example is:

getSystemId
Libsmbios:    0.12.1
System ID:    0x01EB
Service Tag:  xxx
Express Service Code: xxx
Product Name: PowerEdge SC1435
BIOS Version: 1.0.0
Vendor:       Dell Inc.
Is Dell:      1

We can also see the running bios version. In this case it is v1.0.0 that is quite old and as we can see in the Dell support site there is a newer version 1.1.2 released on 4/10/2007 that brings some significant improvements.
Now where can we find the bios update file in a format we can actually use? We have go to http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs/ and search after our system ID. In my case this returned two bios files:

system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01eb_version_1.0.0
system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01eb_version_1.1.2

Note: as you can see these are in the format: system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_SYSTEM_ID_version_BIOS_VERSION.
You need to have the proper system ID for this (not sure what would happen if you try with a different system bios as I was not curious enough to try this out ).

From the appropriate folder download the bios.hdr file. In my case this was:
wget http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs/system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01eb_version_1.1.2/bios.hdr

3. Perform the BIOS update

We will need first to load a kernel module (dell_rbu) that is required by libsmbios for BIOS updates. This exists in debian default kernels (if you are running a vanilla kernel you only need to compile it as a module as it is included in the standard linux kernel starting with Linux 2.6.14):

modprobe dell_rbu

(you will not see any output if all is ok). You can check if this was really successful by running lsmod and you should see the module loaded:

lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
dell_rbu               13088  0
firmware_class         15616  1 dell_rbu
...

And finally we need to run:

dellBiosUpdate -u -f bios.hdr

(this from the location you downloaded the bios.hdr file; else add the full path to the bios.hdr file)

The output will look like:

dellBiosUpdate -u -f bios.hdr

WARNING: packet updates are not fully tested yet for packet modes v0/v2.
         We recommend that only monlithic updates be used at this point.
         You should only use packet mode on v0/v2 systems if you know what you are
         doing (for example, testing.)

Forcing MONOLITHIC mode...

Supported RBU type for this system: (MONOLITHIC, PACKET)
Using RBU v2 driver. Initializing Driver.
Setting RBU type in v2 driver to: MONOLITHIC (FORCED)
Prep driver for data load.
Writing RBU data (4096bytes/dot): .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Notify driver data is finished.
Activate CMOS bit to notify BIOS that update is ready on next boot.
Update staged sucessfully. BIOS update will occur on next reboot.

That’s it. You need to reboot your system in order to complete this. Once the system is rebooted it will first perform the bios update and then continue to load the system.

After the reboot my example system was showing:

getSystemId
Libsmbios:    0.12.1
System ID:    0x01EB
Service Tag:  xxx
Express Service Code: xxx
Product Name: PowerEdge SC1435
BIOS Version: 1.1.2
Vendor:       Dell Inc.
Is Dell:      1

Conclusion: hopefully other debian/ubuntu users will find this information useful while running Debian on Dell systems. Personally, I have seen one other method described by Felix Schwarz in his doc “Flashing a Dell Bios with Linux” but this will require to boot using a boot floppy image to flash the bios and normally this will require direct access to the system or at least a remote console. The above method can be performed remotely and doesn’t require anything special besides a ssh connection.

The fact is that until yesterday the most powerful hardware that I have seen available on any datacenter I am familiar with, were the Dual Xeon CPU (2 x 3.6GHz Intel XEON) and AMD Dual Opteron (2 x Dual Core Opteron 265) based servers. No Quad Xeon CPUs nor the Dual Core from Intel was in any offerings I have seen.

Yesterday ThePlanet and EV1 announced that they will offer a new line of servers with the New Intel Woodcrest Processor Technology:
http://www.theplanet.com/newsroom/release.html?id=20060720

The most powerful system is:
Dell PowerEdge 1950
(2) Dual Core Intel 5130 Woodcrest Processors
2048MB (Fully buffered DIMMS) RAM
2 x 250GB SATA II Hard Drive
2500GB Bandwidth

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1950?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

The servers are powered by the next generation of Dell PowerEdge Servers 1950 (Dell’s 9th generation of servers)

My personal opinion:
Even if they have chosen to not use SCSI HDDs, it looks very cool, and I can’t wait to see one such server running… .
ThePlanet have finally decided to start using 1U rack optimized servers… lol… after offering only tower based servers (P1800, P1600) they have finally learned that space is important .

Are you aware of more powerful servers available to rent in any major US datacenter? Please let me know so I can add them here if there are others available that I am not aware of.

In order to make use of Hyper-Threading in Linux, you will need Hyper-Threading enabled in kernel. But how can you find out if your CPU supports HT? We can get the information from our running Linux system about its CPU by looking into /proc. For example, bellow you can see the output taken from a Xeon system:

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 3201.940
cache size : 2048 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips : 6404.17

Inside the flags section we are looking for a “ht” flag. If it is present, this means that the system supports HT.
Let’s look on another sample taken from a Pentium4 CPU (the un-needed infos were removed):
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz
cpu MHz : 3192.092
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm

Again this system also supports HT. If you don’t see the HT flag, then your system doesn’t support HT. Obviously this will not be available on AMD processors as this is an Intel technology (this might not be true anymore with newer AMD CPUs). Here is an example from an AMD Opteon system:
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 242
cpu MHz : 1593.326
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow

If your CPU supports HT, then you can take advantage of this technology only if HT support is enabled in your running kernel. You can either install a kernel provided by your Linux distribution with HT support (one that has *SMP* inside its name for ex.) or you can compile your own kernel and include HT support.

Once you are running a HT enabled kernel your should normally see the virtual CPU as a regular extra CPU (you will see 2 CPUs on a single CPU system, 4 CPUs on a dual processor system, etc.). You can easily check this with:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you still see only one CPU even after you have installed a HT enabled kernel, then you might want to check:

• HT is not disabled in BIOS.
• APCI is enabled in BIOS.

The installation is really simple, and you can find some details about installing lshw on Debian, or Rhel, Centos, or Fedora in the small posts I have written for this.

Once you have lswh installed on the system the usage is straightforth. Here is the short help listing:

Hardware Lister (lshw) - B.02.06
usage: lshw [-format] [-options ...]
lshw -version

-version        print program version (B.02.06)

format can be
-html           output hardware tree as HTML(link)
-xml            output hardware tree as XML
-short          output hardware paths
-businfo        output bus information

options can be
-class CLASS    only show a certain class of hardware
-C CLASS        same as '-class CLASS'
-disable TEST   disable a test (like pci, isapnp, cpuid, etc. )
-enable TEST    enable a test (like pci, isapnp, cpuid, etc. )

Normally I am using this with the -short parameter to get a quick look on the hardware details of the system. It can output to html, or xml if you want that, and used without any parameters will list full details. Here is a sample output taken from a dual Xeon system, where for the sake of the example I have used the -short parameter:

lshw -short
H/W path                    Device     Class      Description
=============================================================
system     NCCH-DL
/0                                     bus        NCCH-DL
/0/0                                   memory     128KB BIOS
/0/4                                   processor  Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
/0/4/b                                 memory     16KB L1 cache
/0/4/d                                 memory     1MB L2 cache
/0/4/f                                 memory     L3 cache
/0/4/7.1                               processor  Logical CPU
/0/4/7.2                               processor  Logical CPU
/0/5                                   processor  Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
/0/5/c                                 memory     16KB L1 cache
/0/5/e                                 memory     1MB L2 cache
/0/5/10                                memory     L3 cache
/0/5/7.1                               processor  Logical CPU
/0/5/7.2                               processor  Logical CPU
/0/23                                  memory     2GB System Memory
/0/23/0                                memory     512MB DIMM DDR Synchronous
/0/23/1                                memory     512MB DIMM DDR Synchronous
/0/23/2                                memory     512MB DIMM DDR Synchronous
/0/23/3                                memory     512MB DIMM DDR Synchronous
/0/e0000000                            bridge     82875P/E7210 Memory Controller Hub
/0/e0000000/1                          bridge     82875P Processor to AGP Controller
/0/e0000000/1/0                        display    315PRO PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter
/0/e0000000/1c                         bridge     6300ESB 64-bit PCI-X Bridge
/0/e0000000/1e                         bridge     82801 PCI Bridge
/0/e0000000/1e/9            scsi0      storage    MegaRAID
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0      /dev/sda   disk       68GB LD0 RAID1 70135R
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/1    /dev/sda1  disk       Linux filesystem partition
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/2    /dev/sda2  disk       Linux filesystem partition
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/3    /dev/sda3  disk       Linux swap / Solaris partition
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/4    /dev/sda4  disk       61GB Extended partition
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/4/5  /dev/sda5  disk       Linux filesystem partition
/0/e0000000/1e/9/1.0.0/4/6  /dev/sda6  disk       Linux filesystem partition
/0/e0000000/1e/a            eth0       network    82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100]
/0/e0000000/1f                         bridge     6300ESB LPC Interface Controller
/0/e0000000/1f.1                       storage    6300ESB PATA Storage Controller
/0/e0000000/1f.1/0          ide0       bus        IDE Channel 0
/0/e0000000/1f.1/0/0        /dev/hda   disk       149GB WDC WD1600BB-55GUC0
/0/e0000000/1f.1/0/0/1      /dev/hda1  disk       Linux filesystem partition
/0/e0000000/1f.3                       bus        6300ESB SMBus Controller

If you are using X then you might want to check also the nice front-end lswh provides (you will need to additionally install the lshw-gtk package on debian and lshw-gui on RHEL/Centos/Fedora).

For more details you can check the lshw project home page:
http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter