idrac7 + ipmitool stopped working with firmware 1.56.55

i use ipmitool to check health of the poweredge servers from nagios.

in essence i execute:

ipmitool -L USER -H $1 -U $2 -P $3 sel elist last 10

and alert if the exist code is non-zero, then i execute

ipmitool -L USER -H $1 -U $2 -P $3 sdr > stateFile

and again – i alert on non-zero exit code, i also grep the file in search of lines not containing ok/ns.

this was working fine for DRAC 5 in 1950/2950 servers and iDRAC 7 in r620 servers – until 1.51.51 firmware; but it stopped working with the arrival of 1.56.55 fw and started to give me:

Get Session Challenge command failed
Error: Unable to establish LAN session
Get Device ID command failed
Unable to open SDR for reading

after some mailing with dell’s support i learned that i should have been adding -I lanplus to all my ipmitool calls ‘since forever’, and indeed – that solved the problem.

7 thoughts on “idrac7 + ipmitool stopped working with firmware 1.56.55

  1. Thanks for posting this!
    I upgraded my Dell R620’s firmware yesterday, and wasn’t able to monitor their temperature over impi anymore. Thanks to your post my monitoring is back online :-)

    Just to add something useful for others – for the temperature i run:
    ipmitool -L USER -H $1 -U $2 -P $3 sdr type “Temp”
    then parse the output.

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