The DRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) is an interface card by Dell which provides out-of-band management. The controller has its own processor, memory, battery, network connection, and access to the system bus. Key features include power management, virtual media access and remote console, all available through a supported web browser. This gives system administrators the ability to configure a machine as if they were sitting at the local console (terminal).

The DRAC card has several services bound on its dedicated IP; here is the list of the default ports and their usage:

• 22 Secure Shell
• 23 Telnet
• 80 HTTP
• 443 HTTPS
• 161 SNMP (UDP)
• 3668 Virtual Media server
• 5869 Remote racadm server
• 5900-5901 Console Redirection

This list can be useful, if you need to setup port forwarding, or firewall rules while working with DRAC cards. For more, check dell’s manuals.

We are working on a project to implement ISP failover and loadbalancing for a corporate office. So far, we have looked over some hardware solutions but also software linux based ones. VPN is not a must, but it would be nice to have it also on the same device. Here are the best choices we looked so far:

A. Hardware solutions:

1. PePLink Balance 20L/200/300
2. Netgear FVX538
3. Linksys RV042/RV082
4. Xincom Twin WAN Router XC-DPG502
5. ZyXEL ZyWALL 35 UTM

B. Software solutions:

1. Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.org/
2. Endian: http://www.endian.com/en/community/

If you have a better experience on this we would love to hear your suggestions or previous experiences with such devices and your opinion on what is the best way to implement ISP failover and loadbalancing.

The Dell Remote Access Controller or DRAC is an interface card by Dell which provides out-of-band management. The controller has its own processor, memory, battery, network connection, and access to the system bus. Key features include power management, virtual media access and remote console, all available through a supported web browser. This gives system administrators the ability to configure a machine as if they were sitting at the local console (terminal).

Since the DRAC card has its own IP separated from the one of the host server it is very common to assign for it a private IP; or even if it has a public IP it might be protected by a corporate firewall, making it very simple to connect from the corporate office, but not from outside. In such cases when you need to connect to the DRAC console from outside a solution is to tunnel over SSH your DRAC traffic.

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EV1Servers, now part of ThePlanet after last year merger, experienced Saturday afternoon a major downtime on their Huston H1 datacenter: electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No one was injured and apparently no server damaged or lost. Still they were not allowed to bring up their backup power equipment resulting in (all the datacenter servers being down of course):

• approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 clients were affected
• their own management servers, EV1Severs domain management, and SSL management; also their client management and communication tool ServerCommand was in the same situation;
• ev1servers.net nameservers and the H1 resolvers: 207.218.192.38 and 207.218.192.39 were down also (affecting other clients that might had those configured). Also the ones with the domain hosted on ev1 infrastructure, even if they had their server up were not functional because of dns problems.

At this time about 90% of the servers are up, but they are still working to bring up the rest.

So far, The Planet has been managing the situation as a whole quite well, by addressing the issues in a transparent and also timely manner. ThePlanet/Ev1 support team published updates during this period on their status page and also on their forum; also phone greetings recordings reported the status of the problem.

If you need to upgrade the bios firmware of a Dell system (to fix some bugs or add some enhancements, etc.) and you are not running Windows or RHEL (the systems Dell is officially supporting and providing upgrading solutions) there is still hope. I used to manage some Dell’s running RHEL and I loved how easy it was to run all the firmware updates released by Dell for RHEL. I always hoped that there will be some a solution for Debian also. And the solution exists, and I will exemplify it bellow by updating the bios of a Dell PowerEdge SC1435 system.

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We need more and more powerful hardware for the most demanding applications and for the increasing number of users served. Even so most of the big datacenters will not offer (at least in their standard offer) the top hardware systems that are available to date. Why? well because this might not be economical (they will get their investment in purchasing the server hardware in too much time), or they might have established ongoing deals with hardware manufactures for a high lot of servers (that they received the proper discount of course) and want to finish them first.

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Intel introduced Hyper-Threading Technology (HT) in its line of Xeon processors in 2002. HT Technology enables multiprocessor servers to act as if they had twice as many processors installed. Intel’s HT Technology allows a single processor to handle two independent sets of instructions at the same time. In essence, HT Technology converts a single physical processor into two virtual processors. Currently HT is present in other Intel CPUs besides the high level Xeons, like Pentium 4 (with 800MHz CPU bus speed) or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition.
For more details see Intel’s site: http://www.intel.com/products/ht/hyperthreading_more.htm

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There are many ways you can find our various information about the hardware configuration of a Linux system. You can get the information directly from /proc, you can use lspci, etc. And if you are using X then there are many ways to show this information in a nice way. Still, I would like to show you the power of this little tool (lshw) that I found very useful if you are using a SSH connection to the system, and you want to get a quick overview on the hardware details of the system. LSHW can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc.

The installation is really simple, and you can find some details about installing lshw on Debian, or Rhel, Centos, or Fedora in the small posts I have written for this. Read the rest of this entry »