My post “Debian Lenny PXE Installation on Dell PowerEdge 1950/2950 servers: bnx2 annoyances” got some attention and several people used the resulted initrd images. My intention with that post was to show anyone how they can easily build their own updated initrd and use it to successfully install Dell PE 1950/2950 (or other systems that have bnx2 based nic’s). Apparently several people used the images I’ve made available for download and when lenny was updated to 5.0.1 the images stopped working because of the kernel upgrade in the installer. Several people send me notices that this is no longer working and I promptly build updated images for i386 and amd64. I would like to thank to all the people to contact me about this and specially to Alexander Grümmer that showed me that my previous post was not clear enough with the commands needed to rebuild your own initrd. This post will show a full copy and paste type of commands for doing this. Read the rest of this entry »

Debian Lenny installer brings in several improvements over the old stable Etch version, but for us this has been a big disappointment. Basically as I mentioned in an older post “bnx2 missing from stock Debian 2.6.24 etchnhalf kernel“, starting with kernel 2.6.24, the debian team removed the bnx2 kernel module out of the kernel due to license restrictions placed on the firmware. I am a long time debian fan and I can fully understand the reason why they have done that, but still, if you have several hundred servers that use the Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC (that uses the bnx2 module) then you have a problem. This post is intended to show how we solved this problem and hopefully help others in the same situation.

As I mentioned we have many Dell PE1950 and PE2950 servers and we deploy all new servers using PXE boot install and use preseeding to setup basic configurations (custom partitions, apt mirrors, etc.). This worked fine for some years now with debian Etch; let’s see what happens with lenny installer: after the initial pxe boot, the installation halts with this error:
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The DRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) is an interface card by Dell which provides out-of-band management. The controller has its own processor, memory, battery, network connection, and access to the system bus. Key features include power management, virtual media access and remote console, all available through a supported web browser. This gives system administrators the ability to configure a machine as if they were sitting at the local console (terminal).

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.

The Dell Remote Access Controller or DRAC is an interface card by Dell which provides out-of-band management. The controller has its own processor, memory, battery, network connection, and access to the system bus. Key features include power management, virtual media access and remote console, all available through a supported web browser. This gives system administrators the ability to configure a machine as if they were sitting at the local console (terminal).

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.

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If you need to upgrade the bios firmware of a Dell system (to fix some bugs or add some enhancements, etc.) and you are not running Windows or RHEL (the systems Dell is officially supporting and providing upgrading solutions) there is still hope. I used to manage some Dell’s running RHEL and I loved how easy it was to run all the firmware updates released by Dell for RHEL. I always hoped that there will be some a solution for Debian also. And the solution exists, and I will exemplify it bellow by updating the bios of a Dell PowerEdge SC1435 system.

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