Dell IDRAC6 not responding after setting IP using ipmitool
I’m using a Dell R610 server that I purchased on eBay it came with an IDRAC6 Enterprise card already installed. I’ve purchased a few and never really had a problem getting the IDRAC to be accessible once i set an IP address using ipmitool on CentOS.
However today it seems to be very difficult. These are the steps I performed to get it working, so hopefully one of these will help you if you have the same problem as me.
First Set DRAC IP address using ipmitool
We first install ipmitool if you don’t have already have it on your server.
[root@localhost ~]# yum -y install ipmitool
Once that installs you can check your current settings
[root@localhost ~]# ipmitool lan print 1
Set in Progress : Set Complete
Auth Type Support : NONE MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
Auth Type Enable : Callback : MD2 MD5
: User : MD2 MD5
: Operator : MD2 MD5
: Admin : MD2 MD5
: OEM :
IP Address Source : Static Address
IP Address : 192.168.0.120
Subnet Mask : 255.255.255.0
MAC Address : 00:21:9b:a7:67:12
SNMP Community String : public
IP Header : TTL=0x40 Flags=0x40 Precedence=0x00 TOS=0x10
BMC ARP Control : ARP Responses Enabled, Gratuitous ARP Disabled
Default Gateway IP : 192.168.0.1
Default Gateway MAC : 00:00:00:00:00:00
Backup Gateway IP : 0.0.0.0
Backup Gateway MAC : 00:00:00:00:00:00
802.1q VLAN ID : Disabled
802.1q VLAN Priority : 0
RMCP+ Cipher Suites : 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14
Cipher Suite Priv Max : aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
: X=Cipher Suite Unused
: c=CALLBACK
: u=USER
: o=OPERATOR
: a=ADMIN
: O=OEM
Bad Password Threshold : Not Available
Now that we can get access to the DRAC settings, the default is always 192.168.0.120, so we need to set an ip address on our network.
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 10.230.106.131 ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.248 ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 10.230.106.129
Now you should be able to ping the IP.
I still wasn’t able to ping the assigned IP address, and I tried multiple times and still, nothing was pingable for me.
I ended up going down to the data center to try to do it on the console. I reset the DRAC to default, then started over again. Still same issue.
Setting DRAC Shared Mode
After doing a little more investigation, I realized the IDRAC was set to dedicated mode. Meaning I had to have an ethernet cable connected to the DRAC card itself. We only have single connections to all the servers because of this is why I couldn’t connect to the DRAC after setting the IP through the ipmitool.
To set the Shared DRAC ethernet mode.
During the boot process press Control-E
Select LAN Parameters > NIC Selections > Set Shared
Save and Escape to exit.
If you had the same issue as me, that should have resolved it for you.