3 ms·

These are great points, thank you for the insight. A small note I will add is that these days there are remote BIOS options available for servers like iDRAC

• manv1 4y ago
  Do they need a reboot to take effect? I haven't touched a LOM in more than 8 years!
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    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.
    • manv1 4y ago
      I know what DRACs are (it's Dell's LOM). I asked whether the DRAC bios stuff required a reboot.
      • manv1 4y ago
        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.
        • hotpotamus 4y ago
          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/ https://hub.docker.com/r/domistyle/idrac6/
      • Symbiote 4y ago
        I have rarely needed to make changes, but if I recall correctly there were some settings that would take effect immediately, and others that required a reboot. I'd need to refer to the documentation.