If you business is anything like ours, you’ll have racks full of blade server to look after. When it comes to setting them up in can sometimes be a pain. Recently we have been building our dell poweredge 1855′s by re-creating the mirror from an existing server:

1. First thing, make sure you change the local admin password on the source sever if you dont know it already.
2. Pull the second disk out of the source server (normally 0:1), this will break the mirror.
3. Pull both disks out of the server you want to build. Put one of the disks into the source server so it re-builds the mirror.
4. Turn off the destination server. On the destination server, put the disk from the source server into the first slot (normally 0:0)
5. Boot the server, go into the bios. and turn off the network cards so it wont conflict with the existing server
6. Once the os has loaded, login, delete any network teams you might have setup, re-name the server to its new name and pull it out of the domain. Reboot.
7. Before the server reboots, go into its bios again and re-enable its network
8. When the os has loaded, login (you’ll have to go in as the local admin, I hope you changed the password!), re-create any network team you might have and re-join the domain

Once you have done this you should have a copy of the source server, easy! The main problem with doing this was to re-create the mirror on the destination server. Normally you’d just put the disk back in and it would re-create the mirror.

Problem is you cant just put it back in and it re-mirrors because its already got a signature from the previous server.
Sometimes as the server comes up it will recognize the new disk and re-create the mirror, but sometimes you have to go into the controller card (ctrl+m on the dell) and set the new disk to be the secondary, it will warn you its going to blow the old disk away but just ok it and it should re-sync the disks.

Just a quick post that might be of interest to anyone using Dell PowerEdge servers.

You might have noticed that quite a few of the rack mounted and stand alone models come with an extra ethernet port, with a spanner icon above them.
We had noticed these ages ago, but never really paid them much attention. We have recently started to look at them, and they are very useful indeed.

They have various name (ERA, DRAC, RAC) but basicly they give you bios level access to the machine, even when the OS has hung/crashed and you cant use normal remote access tools like VNC and Microsoft’s in built remote desktop (when using remote desktop use a /console switch on windows 2003 to get to the servers console session).

You assign the RAC card an IP address (you can do this in the dell server assistant or when the servers booting), then connect to the ip address in a browser and you get low level access to reboot the server, power cycle it, turn it off etc without ever getting in the car and driving to the site!

It will also give you some server logs and other config options. The remote access tab should let you actually control the pc (even the POST screens) over a VNC like connection, but this doesn’t always seam to work very well. Hopefully a new revision of the firmware will fix that.

I had a problem where for no good reason I could see, my smoothwall firewall would keep disconnecting me from the Internet. If I rebooted the pc it would start to work fine for a while, but would eventually do it again.

I trawled though the logs (no mean feat considering i’m a windows user, and hardly know Linux at all!), and managed to sus out it was something wrong hardware wise with my usb modem, or my isp was having problems.

When I left my PC plugged straight into the modem, I had no problems. So I was going to try and replace the usb card in the pc. Before I did that I thought it might possibly be a power issue (the pc that runs the firewall is quite old and only has an atx mini power supply), so I bought a cheap powered usb hub to run the modem of to see if that helped.

Well, it did! I’ve ran the firewall up for nearly 2 days now and not one disconnect. This might mean my firewall hardware is on its way out, but at least I solved my problem short term!

More info on smoothwall can be found at www.smoothwall.org