Provisioning DELL servers using only linux tools

Posted by Krist van Besien on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Krist van Besien
Published on 2014-02-14T14:37:32Z Indexed on 2014/06/04 21:28 UTC
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dell

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pxeboot

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provisioning

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drac

We have taken delivery of a bunch off Dell Poweredge Rack servers. Unfortunately when ordering it was neglegted to ask for dhcp to be enabled in the built in iDRAC controlers... So they are all stuck on the same IP address. Which means that I'll have to go to each of them individually and configure a new IP in the console...

In the future I want to avoid that. Now Dell proposes to deliver the next batch with auto discovery enabled. As I understand this means that when the machine wakes up for the first time the iDRAC will request a DHCP address. The DHCP server then supposedly also provides a "provisioning" server, that provides it with a username and password, and a configuration to be applied. This would allow us to for example configure things like RAID automatically.

However, I can't seem to find a way to set up such a provisioning server that does not involve setting up a windows machine. I want to use Linux tools exclusively.

Is there a way to do this? I want to just rack servers, switch them on, and then do everything remotely. And that using only linux tools?

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