Setup OOB

This is a utility for configuring out-of-band management systems from within the running (Linux) OS.

It is built to be highly modular and easy to add support for new types of OOB devices.

As of current writing it supports SuperMicro's SMC systems and Dell's iDRAC systems.

It is specifically designed to be easy to run from a Configuration Management system such as Chef, and thus has a 'check' mode to enable idempotent behavior.

Setup OOB attempts to do as much as possible with the generic ipmitool, and falls back to vendor-specific tools only where necessary. In fact, great lengths were taken to determine the underlying IPMI commands in order to not rely on vendor tools.

General Use

Note that the --help message is always the best place to find all the current options. This section instead attempts to provide and overview of usage, not an exhaustive list of all options.

You must tell Setup OOB what type of device it needs to configure with the --type option. As of now it takes either smc or drac. Let's say you want to configure an iDRAC system, you might check to see if it's configured properly with:

setup_oob --type drac --check --name server001-oob --network-mode shared \
  --network-src dhcp

This would return 0 if these were all configured this way or non-zero if something didn't match. If it was not correct, you could converge it to the desired settings by re-running without --check:

setup_oob --type drac --name server001-oob --network-mode shared \
  --network-src dhcp

If configuring a local system, IPMI does not need a password, however for some devices, when vendor-specific tooling is required, it may fail without specifying the password via --old-password (unless it's still the device default).

SMC Licensing

Setup OOB can "activate" SMC systems for you. Automating this can be a bit difficult without having to store every single license in code or have your Configuration Management system reach out to an external database.

However, license keys can be derived from the host MAC address and a private key. IF YOU HAVE PURCHASED LICENSES (and if your legal team approves), you can find the key on the internet and pass it into --key-file. If you do this, then Setup OOB can generate the license key and activate the license for you.

To be clear: DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT PURCHASED A LICENSE FOR THE MACHINES IN QUESTION. Doing so is certainly a violation of your agreement with SMC.

The authors of this software are not responsible for illegal use of this option.

External tools

Setup OOB requires ipmitool at a minimum. For SMC hosts, that is the only requirement. For DRAC hosts, it also requires racadm.