How can I set a custom text on the LCD display on Dell PowerEdge servers

Solution 1:

I've gotten this working before on various dells using IPMI. Here is a post on the matter, http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00352.html

You didn't say which machine it was so your mileage may vary, but IPMI does work and its nice in that you can keep the stack entirely open source and with standard linux software without relying on omconfig or any dell supplied utilities. Also check out ipmitool, which should be sufficient to do what you need if IPMI is compiled in the kernel or supplied as a module in whatever distro you are using.

Solution 2:

I use something like this on a variety of PowerEdge R<something> systems:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Jesper Nyerup <[email protected]>

my $ipmitool = '/usr/bin/ipmitool';

my @chararray = split(//, join(' ', @ARGV));
usage() if (@chararray == 0 or @chararray > 14);

system("$ipmitool raw 0x6 0x58 193 0x0 0x0 ".
    sprintf('0x%x ', scalar(@chararray)).
    join(' ', map { sprintf('0x%x', ord($_)) } @chararray));
system("$ipmitool raw 0x6 0x58 0xc2 0x0 0x0 ".
    "0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0");

sub usage {
    print <<EOF;

  Usage: $0 <string>
         Max. 14 characters

EOF
    exit 1
}

I haven't found a complete reference of Dell's proprietary IPMI commands, but according to the documentation I found here, the first invocation of ipmitool puts the supplied string into one of the display's registers, and the second one flips the display buffer to actually show this.

EDIT: I put this snippet on Github, for future reference.

Solution 3:

Our 1900 lets you enter static text- like the server name or ip address- into a field under the BIOS setup