Yesterday I got to work on a Dell Power Edge server remotely. My idea was to checkout how DELL DRAC Card works and How I can enhance the remote server management capabilities. I found that DRAC interface needed Virtual media plugins for browsers before allowing me to use remote video and remote disk mounting capabilities. It was hard to findout how get it working.
Then I found a blog post on Wazollc Blog which really made a trick. Here is an extract from the blog expaling the Plugin installation for firefox :
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Log into your DRAC5 card as normal.
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Paste this link into the address bar, overwriting what is currently there: https://YOUR_DRAC_IP/plugins/ (be sure to include the trailing slash!)
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Download the .xpi files from both the vkvm and vm directories.
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Extract the .xpi files to temporary folders.
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Open a Terminal, and navigate to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
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Copy the .so files from each extracted folder into this directory.
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Copy the “videoviewer” folder and all subfolders into the plugins directory. (cp -R)
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Navigate to the videoviewer folder and make both .sh scripts executable by everyone, along with the “videoviewer” file.
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Navigate to /usr/lib/firefox/components
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Copy the .xpt files from the extracted directories to this folder.
It really did a trick. I could use the same technique to get the plugin installed for both Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows.
For IE in Windows, I had to download the .cab files and extract the ActiveX files and other contents to C:\Windows\System32. Once this was done, I just had to restart my browser to get the Console and other Interfaces working.
DRAC really rocks…. Remote Access has been made very simple. Only concern is “Plugin“. If Dell could make it available on Firefox and other browsers by default, that would be great.