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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
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1:41 am - fun with dell & drac
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I've tried very hard to avoid dell hardware ever since I got stuck with 50 very disappointing R200 servers, but when they offered to drop the price on the R410 to match a similar configuration from supermicro *and* they can deliver 40 systems in less than two weeks it's pretty hard to turn them down. Even though the BMC on these systems isn't quite as nice (imho) as the IPMI module that's now included on the supermicro Nehalem motherboards it seemed decent enough, and the sales rep couldn't stop talking about the 'openmanage' software that was included and how it would make my life so much easier .. something I'm always in favor of.
As the boxes started filling up the lab I eagerly racked the first system and started looking through the OpenManage documentation, but I quickly realized that the sales rep might have a different interpretation of 'making my life easier'. I was a little amused, but at the same time, disappointed, to read how Dell described the 'convenient installation', specifically the part where they tell me to 'insert the DVD and connect a keyboard and monitor'.
Seriously ? I have 40 servers to deploy, surely you're not suggesting I connect a keyboard and monitor to each system and boot swap DVDs all afternoon ?? After going through the documentation (which is a bit of a mess, if you ask me..) a few more times, they do actually seem to suggest that.
But, no worries, I had a backup plan. As long as I get them all cabled to an isolated switch I'll just uplink them to my dhcp server (as opposed to IT's dhcp server) and discover them automagically with a default PXE target. So I asked the lab engineers to rack 'em, stack 'em, ethernet on an isolated switch, please.
The next day I find all systems neatly racked and cabled .. to various switches that are part of the engineering switch stack. Apparently we're fresh out of 48 port gigabit switches. Curses! That means they'll dhcp from IT's dhcp server, and I won't have a clue what mac addresses they have, which ip they end up with, and forget about setting up a default pxe target. I was really hoping to avoid serial consoles, especially since I had already discovered that serial consoles were not enabled by default. A quick and painless deployment was looking less and less likely.
Fortunately I happened to remember seeing something in the iDRAC documentation about 'default configuration with a static ip'. While this initially struck me as pretty useless .. after all, that's 40 DRACs all trying to use the same static ip, it occurred to me that this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
A quick 'arping 192.168.0.120' confirmed that 40 different mac addresses did in fact reply to this arp request, all in the expected mac range for the onboard broadcom ethernet on the R410. That was certainly easier than connecting to each server to discover the mac address! A little more investigation revealed that eth0, eth1 and the BMC have 3 sequential mac addresses, so based on the BMC's MAC I can determine the eth0 MAC which will end up sending the DHCP request.
I quickly configured static dhcp entries for the 40 MAC addresses I had calculated based on the arping response, but .. I was no longer in the office and didn't bother to get remote power cyclers on these systems since I would use IPMI to powercycle these systems .. but since they were all trying to use the same static ip, that clearly wasn't going to work..
Or could it ? Turns out, with a static arp entry for the ip address I was able to connect to one of the systems just fine, use the BMC to power-up or reboot the host, remove the mac entry, and repeat this 39 more times for each of the systems. (scripted based on the arping output, naturally).
All in all a pretty hideous work-around, but at the end of the day I'm able to discover any unconfigured DRACs on the network, make a reasonable guess about the host's primary interface, setup a dhcp entry with a kickstart PXE target, powercycle the host, re-configure dhcp to boot from the local disk on subsequent reboots, and register the host with our management database without touching the servers, a dvd, or connecting to a serial console even once.
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| Friday, December 19th, 2003
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1:43 pm - Carefull what you ask for
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Well, I said I needed change in my last entry .. looks like im going to get it.
No, Im not moving, or changing jobs (just yet), but I have been re-arranging the
apartment like crazy for the past few days, something which, as it turns out,
was way overdue.
I finally got an excuse to get a new couch and re-arrange everything else to make
room for a visitor. 3 people and a cat in this apartment .. should makethings a
little more interesting, if nothing else :)
Now if only things would get a little more interesting at work Id be set ..
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| Friday, October 17th, 2003
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12:50 am - Change is good
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I've been thinking a lot about change lately, but since just thinking about change seems to be terribly unproductive I'll try to keep track of change here.
Work is ever changing, right now its pretty boring and somewhat annoying.. yay.
Spending more/less time in the office .. the jury is still out on this one.
Drinking less beer... I think im just too tired to go out and drink
Stopped drinking coffee & coke; im not convinced it actually does anything for me
- Had a quad americano today after 2 weeks without caffeine .. didnt even wake me up
I think I need a hobby .. or maybe re-arrange my appartment.. or move to vancouver .. or get a different job .. or ..
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| Friday, July 27th, 2001
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3:37 am
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Finally, after many weeks (months?) of just chugging away at my code tonight I was finally back in the zone .. conveniently so, because my pm mentioned that he would like to start testing the latest release on a server we're supposed to deliver one of these days, and boy did I have a lot of things I wanted to change before releasing this puppy into the wild .. and sure enough, even though I kind'a decided to put off the major re-write I was hoping to do and just stick to overhauling the authentication part of the code, before too long I was digging deep in the bowels of the code, restructuring code, almost completely throwing out my 'latest and greatest' idea about how to organize this monster .. 12 hours later I've re-written all significant parts of the applications, now all that remains is tying up the loose ends, hope I implemented everything and more importantly, didnt break anything.
Seems like just about the *least* apportune time to see if I can distract myself by finally posting something in this here livejournal, doesnt it ..
I'd like to think that I will find myself back in the zone after this brief distraction, but I know I could already see the signs up ahead .. 'you are now leaving the zone .. thanks for stopping by, please come back soon'.
Maybe a shower will clear my head .. maybe ..
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