Getting Dell’s racadm working in Fedora 20

Dell provides the racadm software on Linux that allows you to manage Dell hardware from a Linux system. Getting it installed on a very modern distribution like Fedora 20 isn’t supported, but here are some steps that might help you along the way:

First off, go to Dell’s site and review the racadm download instructions. I’d recommend following the Remote RACADM instructions so that you can manage multiple systems from your Fedora installation. You’ll be looking for a download with the text Linux Remote Access Utilities in the name. At the time of this post’s writing, the filename is OM-MgmtStat-Dell-Web-LX-7.4.0-866_A00.tar.gz.

Un-tar the file and you’ll get two directories dumped out into your working directory: docs and linux:

tar xvzf OM-MgmtStat-Dell-Web-LX-7.4.0-866_A00.tar.gz
cd linux/rac/RHEL6/x86_64/
yum localinstall *.rpm

That should install all of the software you need. There weren’t any dependencies to install on my Fedora workstation but yum should take care of these for you if you have a more minimal installation.

Once that’s done, close your shell and re-open it. You should be able to run racadm from your terminal. You’ll probably get an error like this if you run it:

ERROR: Failed to initialize transport

Running strace reveals that racadm is looking for libssl.so but can’t find it. Fix that by installing openssl-devel:

yum -y install openssl-devel

Now you should be able to run racadm and configure your servers!