Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud
by hotpotamus on Friday March 10, 2023 @02:44PM
(#35099817)
DRACs are a Dell specific term for what is generically known as IPMI or out of band management. They were quite well developed when I worked on servers well over a decade ago now. The good ones are basically as independent of the system they're attached to as possible and essentially give you the equivalent of physical access to a server.
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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud
by manv1 on Friday March 10, 2023 @03:06PM
(#35100145)
I know what DRACs are (it's Dell's LOM). I asked whether the DRAC bios stuff required a reboot.
Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud
by manv1 on Friday March 10, 2023 @03:34PM
(#35100584)
Just looked at the docs, it's apply and reboot which makes sense.
Oh, I forgot that you also have to manage the certs on the LOMs. Luckily browsers still allow you to bypass expired certs by default.
I wonder if you can still get into machines with the old SHA-1 stuff?
That's why serial consoles are better IMO.
Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud
by hotpotamus on Friday March 10, 2023 @04:11PM
(#35101130)
Yeah, I'd consider the DRAC completely independent of the BIOS question. There are also OS tools - I believe Dell's is called OMSA - that can flip some of the switches in the BIOS (I remember this from having to mess with NUMA settings at one time), but they still needed to reboot.
As far as the crypto stuff, it's an issue. I fairly recently had to tweak some old 11th generation Dell Servers and tried out the DRACs, but Java really doesn't want you to use RC4 - I remember that being the dealbreaker. Nicely, someone put a conatiner up on Docker Hub that dealt with it https://hub.docker.com/r/domistyle/idrac6/