Dell Server (9g) notes

Owned by Christoph Lechleitner
Last updated: 2013-05-04

Warning: Some of the notes below only apply to Dell's 9th server generation

Infos about 2013's 12th generation can be found at http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Repository, Ubuntu/Debian hints at http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/deb/latest/

Dell/Linux notes, general:

linux.dell.com is always a good start and Debian/Ubuntu users can be looking forward to see more support there.

While several former PERC- and MegaRAID drivers provided all important things somewhere under /proc/, and Dell there been several tools by Dell and others, like OpenManage*, mptlinux, mpt-status, srvadmin, ..., my gut feeling is that srvadmin (apropriate for RHEL) and finally dellomsa (apropriate for Debian from 2.6.18 on) are the right packages to just cron-check the health of e.g. RAID disks.

srvadmin and RAID status on RHEL5 systems:

From Dell's OMSA repository hints:

wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi | bash
yum install srvadmin-all
srvadmin-services.sh start
omreport storage pdisk controller=0

dellomsa and RAID status on Debian systems:

Based on Dell's Debian-on-9g-Servers hints:

echo "deb http://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara" >>/etc/apt/sources.list.d/sara_nl.list
apt-get update
apt-get install openipmi ipmitool dellomsa
omreport storage pdisk controller=0

In the first place, the deb line was using ftp:, but http: seems to work also and is more propable to be accepted through corporate firewalls.

omreport usage:

I have not yet found a manpage or the like, but when called like ...

omreport -?
omreport storage -?

... (and so on) omreport a least lists the crucial commands and options.

Interesting reports I found include RAID system battery ...

omreport storage battery

... Power supplies (especially when a server has 2 of them) ...

omreport chassis pwrsupplies

... and always the temperatures:

omreport chassis temps

omreport based check-HW-RAID.sh cron script:

This can serve as template for a cron job checking your HW RAID:

#!/bin/sh

RAIDFAILS=$(omreport storage pdisk controller=0 |grep Status |grep -n Status |grep -v Ok)
# the grep -n is not redundand, it "prefixes" the disc number to each status line

test -z "$RAIDFAILS" && exit 0

echo "HW RAID is failing" |alert-the-admin

 

Service Tag detection on all Linuxes:

From Dell's PowerEdge hints:

Find the Dell Service Tag number easily:

hwinfo --bios | grep -E "System Info|Serial:" | grep -n1 System | tail -n1 | sed 's/"//g' | awk '{print $3;}'

The above line works on Debian and SuSE systems, RedHat has not yet consumed the hwinfo tool yet.

This seems to work on RedHat based systems:

dmidecode | grep -E "Serial Number"  |head -n1 | awk '{print $3;}' 



From: IBCL BLog.
Originally posted: 2008-09-21