Dell Remote Access Card / DRAC III/XT = fun times?

[VolumetricSteve]

My new(used) server has this remote management card and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this, or any similar hardware (particularly the Dell ones), if so what was the basic setup like, was it worth the trouble, etc.

[Doombrain]

no

[VolumetricSteve]

oh

[^misantropia^]

I know it somewhat. At my previous job they were used as a glorified serial console and to troubleshoot boot problems.

You can probably find more info and people that work daily with this stuff on http://serverfault.com/

[VolumetricSteve]

Well, let me ask this...it's in a server I'm going to use exclusively as a dedicated quake 3 server. Given technologies that are free now (I think) like LogMeIn and VNC, is there anything really advantageous I could do with that management card towards that effect? (aside from handling system crashes remotely)

[Foo]

DRAC will give you remote screen and remote media mounting options. If you're putting this in a datacenter you can make it accessible via VPN or the public IP (bleh) and use it to power up/power down and install things on the server (OS, firmware, apps).

Outside of that... that's about it. Oh and you can get some hardware health emails out of it, as well.

[VolumetricSteve]

Restarting in the event of a crash would be useful, and so would remote screen. I'll look into it. Sadly, public IP might be my only option, but it's not like I'm doing anything really sensitive, or anything that can be damaged by hacking. I've found a lot of the Dell Support resources for the device, but is there anywhere else I should be looking?

Thanks for the helpful replies.

[^misantropia^]

VolumetricSteve, most co-lo providers will give you a serial console and a last-resort reset button that will let you troubleshoot 95% of all problems. The only times I drove up to the DC was for hardware failures.

[VolumetricSteve]

well my plan is to have my "datacenter" (which consists of one AMD number cruncher and one Intel dedicated server) hooked up on the weekends, so when I leave home I can still access my number cruncher and since I have this server, I figured I could protect it behind my server somewhat because both systems would be behind the DRAC card.

AMD system - ethernet - Server - ethernet - router

I figure this way, on my AMD all I need to do is configure VNC to talk to the server, then when I'm remotely controlling the server, I should also be able to control the AMD. It's nothing entirely too fancy, I just figured I'd try to make the most of what I have if it sounds plausible.