How to clear all jobs on DELL Lifecycle Controller via iDRAC

When you have problem with DELL Lifecycle Controller jobs you can delete all jobs by single iDRAC command. This command

racadm -r ip address -u user name -p password jobqueue delete -i JID_CLEARALL_FORCE

deletes all of the jobs plus the orphaned pending and restarts the data manager service on the iDRAC. It will take about 90-120 secs before the iDRAC is able to process another job.

Occasionally the iDRAC may need to be reset after issuing the above command due to other issues outside the job queue processing. In such case you can issue commands in the following order:

• racadm -r ip address -u user name -p password jobqueue delete -i JID_CLEARALL_FORCE
• Wait 120 secs
• racadm –r ip address –u user name –p password racreset

Redirect DELL PowerEdge server serial port to iDRAC

Let's assume you use COM2 serial port for console access into your operating system. This is usually used on linux, freebsd or other *nix like systems. Administrator then can use serial terminal to work with OS. However it is useful only for local access. What if you want to access terminal console remotely? If you have DELL PowerEdge server with iDRAC 7 you can redirect serial communication to your iDRAC. You probably know you can ssh into iDRAC for remote server operations. When you are in the iDRAC you can use command "connect" which will connect you to your serial terminal.

To get it working a few steps have to be taken on Power Edge server.

1/ Configure iDRAC

• Go to Network & Serial
• Set IPMI’s Baud Rate for example 9.6 kbps (Serial Port Baud Rate)
• Apply Settings

2/ During boot enter the Server’s BIOS

• Go to “Serial Communication”
• Switch from “Off” to “On without Redirection”
• Switch Port Configuration from “Serial Device1=COM1;Serial Device2=COM2” to “Serial Device1=COM2;Serial Device2=COM1”
• Save Settings and Reboot Controller

After these steps the Server’s serial console is available via iDRAC:

Login to iDRAC using SSH and type “connect” at the prompt. After that the SSH session shows the serial console as if directly connected to the system’s serial port.

Out-of-band BIOS settings management

Today I did some troubleshooting with customer. We needed to verify what NUMA type is set in server's BIOS. In the past I posted more info about BIOS NUMA settings here. The customer sighed that he can not restart the server just to jump and look into BIOS screen. My answer was ...

... it is not necessary to reboot the server because you have modern gear which allows you to read BIOS settings via out-of-band management card.

In our case we had DELL rack server PowerEdge R620 with iDrac 7 management card. BIOS settings are not visible on iDRAC web interface and you have to use CLI (aka racadm). There are several methods how to use racadm cli but IMHO the simplest method is to SSH into iDRAC ip address and execute command:

 racadm get bios.MemSettings 

You should get result similar to the screenshot bellow. 

For more information look at DELL Tech Center.