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.

Not very much to post at the moment. In the middle of doing a big change to the infrastructure at work. We are moving to a completely new subnet range. Not very complex but taking a lot of planning.

Programming wise started to play about with the asp.net Ajax extensions. Get more info on them here at www.asp.net. The Ajax idea has been around for a while, it just takes existing technology (Java and xml) and puts them in a nice easy to use package. You can now develop very interactive web based applications very quickly. One you get your head round how it all works!!

Also looking at creating an rss feed using asp.net. Our newspaper is trying to get more into the ‘digital’ age, so are throwing around words like rss and pretending they’ve been using it for ages. I’m trying to create an rss feed from the PA (press association) stories we get. I might get some brownie points for it and its quite interesting. A walk though of creating one is at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478968.aspx.

When I get more into both of these things ill post anything interesting on here

Listening to: Little man Tate. Very good and not played enough on the radio. Far better than the View who are getting raved about far to much

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

I’ve today managed to find the solution to a problems that’s been bugging me for a bit. When trying to install software(an .msi file) via a computer group policy, I couldn’t get it to work. In the application event log I was getting errors along the lines of

The installation source is invalid

As far as I could see I had given the computer NTFS rights into the share where the software was located, and everyone had read access to the share.

While trying to install the Dell open manage client software today I worked out what it was. Our Active directory is based on Windows 2000 servers, but the unc share the software was located on was a Windows2003 server. I moved the installation source to a windows 2000 server, gave the Domain Computers group access to the files and it worked!

Not entirely sure what caused the problem in the first place, there must be some incompatibility between the 2 operating systems way of working with the NTFS permissions.

So I managed to get the software on, but I cant get the client pc’s to report properly to the Dell open manage IT assistant, without lots of manual intervention on the pc’s.
You need to create a new domain user and run the IAP service as this users so the client will report. If anyone has done this already with some sort of script, let me know how you did it.

Listening to: NoFx, Punk In Drublic