Howto: Change the IP address of a Dell 4/P DRAC from the command line without rebooting the server

by admin on January 6, 2009

Normally you configure a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) when a server is initially commissioned. Once the card is set, administrators rarely if ever need to modify the settings. If you do need to change the settings, the server needs to be restarted so the DRAC BIOS can be modified, which obviously results in system downtime and requires a physical presence at the server console.

I had Dell onsite at one of my remote offices 150 miles away from me today. The tech replaced the DRAC, and once he verified the RAC service started on the Windows 2003 server he was out of there. No one onsite was technical enough to change the DRAC’s default IP address of 192.168.0.120 to a real IP on our subnet, so I had to change in via the Dell racadm command line tool.

Here’s how I changed the DRAC’s IP address:

The DRAC 4/P software is installed into the C:\Program Files\Dell\SysMgt\RAC4 directory by default, so I changed to this directory from a command prompt.

Next I used the racadm.exe utility to configure the DRAC’s TCP/IP settings:

racadm setniccfg -s 172.27.116.24 255.255.255.0 172.27.116.1

where
172.27.116.24 is the ip address I want assigned to the DRAC
255.255.255.0 is the DRAC’s subnet mask
172.27.116.1 is the default gateway used by the DRAC

That’s it! I was immediately able to browse to https://172.27.116.24 and login to the DRAC with the default account root and default password calvin. No server restart is required.

Tagged as: default IP address, default password, Dell, DRAC, howto, racadm

{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

netmon January 21, 2009 at 5:28 pm

Thanks, worked perfectly

Roman Diaz - Threadfin January 21, 2009 at 6:40 pm

Thanks…
I was lost in the 50 page manual trying to find this simple command

Max Ustinov January 30, 2009 at 8:45 am

Nice article and is very helpful. You may want to mention Dell OMSA Managed Node an/or other way of installing/running racadm.exe

Steven Saehrig February 16, 2009 at 4:19 pm

Thank you so much I had the same problem. this helped me out a ton.

Dan July 6, 2009 at 6:38 pm

Thank you. That worked great!

Nacho July 28, 2009 at 2:00 pm

Hi!
Don’t you know how can I do to view the DRAC IP Address from Windows?
Thanks!

Julie July 30, 2009 at 8:09 am: From the server run

racadm getniccfg

-Julie

Reply

Jody Falcon August 20, 2009 at 3:12 pm

Do you know how to do this on a Linux server? I did a search for racadm and could not find it. Using Redhat 4.2 on a Dell PE 6800. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jody

NeoKorteX September 3, 2009 at 8:36 am