I have completely re-written the iLO SSL Signing Script in the last week to make use of the iLO PS Library. This has seen a reduction in script code, but more importantly with the assistance of Joe I’ve fixed a couple of significant bugs in the original script – The script will now work properly for iLO3 devices for example. Script can be downloaded from the PS Scripts Page.

On a similar note, the iLO bulk update script for mass configuration has also been updated to use the iLO Library. The result being that the output from the reports is in an object format that is much easier to manipulate in Powershell. Once again, you can obtain on the PS Script Page.

The library is a wrapper for the Dell RACADM DRAC Tool (check out the Third Party Utils on the Powershell Scripts page to get) which is much like the CPQLOCFG.exe tool for HP.

What I find interesting is that the Dell tool is really well written for applying configuration, but can be a little obtuse about the results it returns (strings mainly), which is the opposite of the HP Tool who use XML for configuration and results information – where I find the XML for configuration a bit obtuse, but excellent for reporting…

Anyway, If you are managing a large number of Dell servers with iDRAC Interfaces in a windows environment, you may wish to take a look at this powershell library – it may be quite handy!

Click here for the Library Page

• Functions now have aliases to be more powershell-like. E.g Mod-iLO, Get-iLOVersion etc. Please use these instead of function names. I will be renaming the functions at a later date. The original 1.0 functions will remain as aliases for backward compatibility, but with a depreciated warning.
• New Function to Parse the RIBCL output from Mod-iLO Function. This can be used for report generation/actions.
• New Function to generate Custom Error Messages for use inline with the Parse-RIBCL* functions. Useful for exception handling.

The updated Library can be found on the iLO PS Library Page 

I’m pleased to release version 1.0 of the Powershell iLO Library. This script incorporates many of the pieces of code used in my scripts in a format that can be included in your own iLO related powershell code. More importantly I have made a number of improvements to the code, mainly around ensuring most functions return an object or array of objects for better result manipulation in PS. It will also mean that I can update the reusable code in one place for my scripts, instead of updating 9 scripts.

This is such a big thing for me, I have created it’s own page.

For those who dabble in powershell and have HP Servers to maintain, I think this may really be of interest to you.

Get it here:

iLO Powershell Library

As it turned out the error is actually a .NET Error message referring to being unable to resolve DNS. It would appear then that the Repository application is therefore treating the local repository as a network location.

Armed with this knowledge, I then did some digging around on the Dell Enterprise Technology Centre and found that the Dell Repository Manager gets it’s network settings (proxy etc) from the system (via Internet Explorer). I was on to something!. Opened IE, removed the proxy settings and restarted the application. It Worked! I was then able to make my own bundles from the local repository!

So there you have it. If you are having trouble exporting bundles to SUU packages due to the above errors, it may be worthwhile to check your proxy settings.

While DHCP scopes are easy to update, static assignment on servers aren’t. Theres no magic GPO you can set and be damned if you do it by hand for over 500 servers. Thankfully WMI as we have previously seen will allow a scriptable way to update network adaptor properties.

So I have written a script to do automate the process. The script uses Quest AD Management cmdlets for Powershell.

Download the script here

How to run the script follows

This is my first adventure in using command line parameters instead of arguments, and I am rather happy with the results.

The script run without any parameters should provide basic usage information. The -server parameter can be run for a single server or with wildcards. it will then run against computers matching the details in AD. Run without any further parameters, this script will generate a report of matching machines, DNS Settings, WINS Settings and whether DHCP is enabled. The report will also list any servers that it was unable to ping, or contact by WMI.

the -DNSServers and -WINSServers parameters are as they sound – usually a comma separated list of the primary and secondary DNS. -WINSServers can also be run with a value of ‘delete’ to remove WINS Settings.

Standard Disclaimer: This script is provided as-is and I take no responsibility or liability for any damage this script may cause in your environment

Last week some helpful engineers came down to try and work out why our servers were misbehaving as they were unable to reproduce the problem in their lab.

After a bit of work, they were able to reproduce the bug on the lab machine as well as our local. It would appear that there is a bug in the LifeCycle Controller Firmware version 1.5.0.671. which only manifests itself when more than one power supply has power applied to it at the time of boot. The fault does not appear if only one power supply is powered on at boot.

Quite an interesting albeit annoying bug for very few people. For possibly 99% of people out there, they either won’t be using the unified server configurator for deployment, won’t have version 1.5.0.671 of LCC firmware installed, find the ‘lag’ an annoyance but not a showstopper, don’t have a R910 server, or are building with only 1 PSU active so won’t see the bug.

The good news is that now its a reproducable bug, it’ll get fixed. Theres nothing worse than a bug that is specific to certain machines

We took delivery of our first order of Dell Servers. It was exciting to have a new vendor as HP drove me to despair as many would know. 2 R810s and 3 R910s sitting on a bench in the build room. “Ben can you please run these up for us and document the build process – we need to get the R910s deployed in the next couple of weeks”. No Problem.

Did all my build documentation on an R810. Nice and easy. Learnt about the iDRAC interface, and booting the VMWare image from the SD Cards. It was all a bit easy and I could imagine with a little bit of practice we could have these machines built and deployed in about 10 mins per box. But then I started work on building the R910s….

Using the Universal Server Configurator utility, I quickly found that it was difficult to use the keyboard and mouse – stop start, stop start – in my days of programming I’d call this a buffer issue and not being flushed in a timely manner. To best illustrate this, here is a video.

OK, no problem, might just be an issue with this one server, lets try another. Nope, same problem. In the end I had the following troubleshooting information:

• All of the R910s we bought had this problem (3 in the build room and more at a storage warehouse)
• The problem was only within the Lifecycle Controller/Universal Server Configurator. Keyboard/mouse worked fine from VMWare Console, BIOS.
• Problem was ONLY with the R910s, I had no problems with the R810s
• Problem manifested itself from the Local Console and the iDRAC remote console.

I’ll spare you the details of support. About one and a bit weeks later a new main board, iDRAC interface and Riser card arrive with a Engineer. Replace the mainboard and the problem is still there Replace the Riser Card and iDRAC and the problem is gone! yay!

So now we know the problem was either the mainboard or the Riser Card/iDRAC.

Please be aware that in no way am I saying that there is a fault with this particular model of server. This is something that I have seen with a limited number of machines during the course of my work. 

I’ve just updated all the links to scripts on this site to point to a dropbox account thanks to apple deciding to do away with iDisk. I think all the links are working, but if you find any that may be broken, please let me know.

I came across this post by Scott Lowe in 2006 about doing it with dsquery and logparser, but with Powershell now available I could do it in this instead.

Below is the 2 lines to do this. Note I use Quest AD management cmdlets, so you may need these.

$users = Get-QADUser -Sizelimit 0
$users | group name |sort count -descending

Yes, it’s really that simple. Duplicate account names are rare in AD, so with this command if there are any, they should appear in the first few lines. If you have a lot of user accounts, I recommend piping this out to file and opening in a text editor.