Making iDRAC URL and IP address available on Linux operating systems

This is in continuation of the previous article on exchanging information between Linux OS and the iDRAC.

It is useful to have some information about the iDRAC available in the OS, notably the IP address of the BMC and the URL to iDRAC’s web console. While the URL can be used to establish a session with the iDRAC’s web console, the IP can be used to configure other services that require communication with the iDRAC (to be discussed in future articles). Both of these can be retrieved over IPMI.

The IP address can be retrieved by querying each lan channel:

        # ipmitool lan print <channel>

Accessing the URL requires a new sub-command to getsysinfo in ipmitool (in 1.8.12 and later) and can be retrieved with:

        # ipmitool mc getsysinfo delloem_url

The exchange-bmc-os-info script can make this information available to privileged users as shell environment variables: BMC_URL and BMC_IPv4.
 

Using exchange-bmc-os-info to access URL and IP

• To start using the iDRAC URL or IP, follow the installation instructions described in the previous post to install the exchange-bmc-os-info package and ensure the service is started.
• The URL and IP will be available in /var/run/bmc-info. We ensure this is set at login with /etc/profile.d/set-bmc-url.sh
• Once set up and logged in as the root user, we can open a browser session to iDRAC's web console with:

                          # su user –c "xdg-open $BMC_URL" 

Note: xdg-open as root is discouraged. 

• We can connect to the iDRAC’s ssh port with:

                        # ssh root@$BMC_IPv4

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