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Christian
Asked: 2009-11-04 07:10:28 +0800 CST

How can I set a custom text on the LCD display on Dell PowerEdge servers

  • 772

Does someone know a way of showing custom text there?

Using the omconfig script from Dell does not work for me for some reason, but I don't want to install 80MB of Java and webserver and whatever anyway. Ideally some small tool should be able to do this.

Did anybody reverse engineer anything yet?

I'm currently trying to solve this on a R410 server

dell

5 Answers

  1. I use something like this on a variety of PowerEdge R<something> systems:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Jesper Nyerup <[email protected]>

my $ipmitool = '/usr/bin/ipmitool';

my @chararray = split(//, join(' ', @ARGV));
usage() if (@chararray == 0 or @chararray > 14);

system("$ipmitool raw 0x6 0x58 193 0x0 0x0 ".
    sprintf('0x%x ', scalar(@chararray)).
    join(' ', map { sprintf('0x%x', ord($_)) } @chararray));
system("$ipmitool raw 0x6 0x58 0xc2 0x0 0x0 ".
    "0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0");

sub usage {
    print <<EOF;

  Usage: $0 <string>
         Max. 14 characters

EOF
    exit 1
}

    I haven't found a complete reference of Dell's proprietary IPMI commands, but according to the documentation I found here, the first invocation of ipmitool puts the supplied string into one of the display's registers, and the second one flips the display buffer to actually show this.

    EDIT: I put this snippet on Github, for future reference.

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  2. Best Answer

    I've gotten this working before on various dells using IPMI. Here is a post on the matter, http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00352.html

    You didn't say which machine it was so your mileage may vary, but IPMI does work and its nice in that you can keep the stack entirely open source and with standard linux software without relying on omconfig or any dell supplied utilities. Also check out ipmitool, which should be sufficient to do what you need if IPMI is compiled in the kernel or supplied as a module in whatever distro you are using.

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  3. Our 1900 lets you enter static text- like the server name or ip address- into a field under the BIOS setup

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  4. Dell support can provide you with small text mode programs to set the server name and other information that will be shown on the LCD. There are different utilities for the different PowerEdge generations.

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  5. On a recent iDRAC you can use racadm set System.LCD.UserDefinedString "Test 123!" to set a user-defined text on the LCD panel.

    To connect to racadm, SSH to the iDRAC address. The prompt is racadm>>.

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