Remote Access Card (RSA/DRAC) Detection

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

It would be a major advantage to be able to report the presents and the IP address of Remote Access Cards, specifically in Dell (DRAC) and IBM (RSA). Does anyone know if this is possible.

-Ken

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Ken,

Do you know if these devices appear as “Network Adapters” in the system?

Ben

3

(imported comment written by chenbr91)

These are only exposed via snmp calls… as telnet classes and ssh is how you would manage the out of band interfaces on servers. I have explored this world before, and found that these classes (from the manufacturer) are well documented on the unix side and not windows. Toolsets built around perl, etc are better here…

4

(imported comment written by BenKus)

So these are standalone devices? Or sub-components of servers? Do we know if NMAP can identify them (in which case we can use our Asset Discovery Fixlet site).

Ben

5

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

They are stand-alone devices, basically a computer on a card. They typically interface with the main OS via a driver and/or service. They are also represented in the BIOS of the machine.

6

(imported comment written by BenKus)

I would expect that if they have an IP address our Asset Discovery module can at least scan and identify them… Does anyone have any experience trying this?

Ben

7

(imported comment written by jeff_saxton91)

The cards on the Dell systems may expose some properties through Dell OMCI. You can check here:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smcliins/cli76/en/refgd/index.htm#Table_1-4

If this is the case we

may

be able to do something.

8

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Thanks for looking into this. We are licensed for DSS but are not using it yet. Are you saying that this will be able to discover the information for these cards? I would imaging that this would be a popular request. Companies with hundreds or thousands of servers that can report on the presents and IP of these Remote Management Cards would be huge! I believe SCOM can do this, but am not positive.

-Ken

9

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Any news on this? This would be great to have!

The DELL DRAC and HP ILO are both detected by DSS correctly and the DELL DRAC can be queried through the OS via the OpenManage Agents, assuming one has them installed.

10

(imported comment written by MattBoyd)

If you want to get the IP address of a Dell Remote Access Controller on a Windows Server, you should be able to do so with WMI. The only caveat is that you need to have Dell OpenManage Server Administrator installed first (which is downloadable from Dell’s support site) in order to expose the WMI objects. Here’s some quick relevance I wrote up to get the IP of a RAC on one of our servers:

string values of selects 
"AccessInfo From Dell_RemoteAccessServicePort" of wmi 
"ROOT\CIMV2\Dell"

I only ran it against one server that I

knew

had a RAC and it returned the IP address. Obviously, this will not work on Linux/Unix machines (perhaps you can use DMI?).