The Dell CS24-SC and on-board BMC

     The Dell CS24-SC is a unique piece of server hardware, packed with CPU and RAM but limited on bells and whistles. With no DRAC option available, the only way to remotely manage this server is the built-in Baseboard Management Controller or BMC. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because the newer BMCs that support IPMI 2.0+ do offer iKVM support, in my case my I was limited by an older firmware though. It does give the ability to check the servers sensors and power it on/off even from an off state.

Accessing the BMC

     There are a few different ways to access the BMC, one way being through a web browser over HTTPS/SSL via the IP of the BMC. In my case with this server in particular the web management would not work, I think this is due to older buggy firmware and there are no updates available for this server. I could see HTTP was running just not responding correctly, my guess would be somethings wrong with the SSL Cert. The other option is to use IPMIView available from SuperMicro. IPMIView has a range of features available including but not limited to iKVM capability, sensor reading, BMC configuration, Power the server On/Off and so on. The feature set is very similar to what you would find on a DRAC or iLo, just missing some of the higher end features.

Link to IMPIView Download – ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/utility/IPMIView/