No worries, and glad to help where I can – someone else from Dell brought this post to my attention (there are employees at Dell that look for posts talking about our products) so I reached out to someone on the OpenManage team to see what they know about the situation.

I understand your pain regarding no Linux versions of tools – I forwarded your comments on to the OME team, who are very interested in customer feedback right now, since the product is relatively new and still open to suggestions. That said, they are considering a lot of input from customers but they have to prioritize based on time / manpower / cost.

From talking to them, I gather that the basic assumption is that most of the time there will be at least 1 or 2 windows workstations in a datacenter, although it seems that’s not always the case. Wish I could help more…

From sunny and HOT Austin, Texas
Peter

I just wanted to thank you for your reply to my blog post, and to apologise for the late reply.
Once I’d got over my surprise that someone from Dell had seen and responded to it I was very pleased to have your helpful comments.

We do all of our system admin on Scientific Linux, so it’s always preferable for us to have Linux-based tools.
With that in mind I’m delighted that your yum repository upgrade is coming soon, and I’m grateful to you for the suggestions on how to get round the “shortage of contiguous memory” problem mentioned in the post.

I must admit that I’m not quite so delighted at OME and Repository Manager only being available in Windows versions, as I have no Windows machines available to me! However you’ve given me lots of useful information, including pointers on how to get the Linux-based tools working for me, so thanks again.

From a very rainy Edinburgh,

Chris.

I’m Peter, a technologist at Dell TechCenter. Thanks for your insightful blog post about Dell OMSA on Linux – it gives great insight into what yourself and other customers are thinking about Dell OpenManage. I can assure you that myself and many others at Dell have read the blog post and that your voice has been heard.

First of all, that is an awesome picture of a heron – I’ve actually seen some catch fish in real life… I felt like I was watching National Geographic.

As to your concerns about OpenManage and our documentation, I see that you have found some additional documentation on our pages so that’s good. I know there are a lot of OpenManage products and it’s not always clear as to exactly which tool you need to accomplish a particular task. We’re trying to make things better by simplifying things for customers and I appreciate the feedback.

To answer your specific concerns, first off it’s my bad that the wiki page had not been updated to reflect OMSA 7.0, which is the latest version. Our other OpenManage page had been updated at http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1968.dell-openmanage-downloads-explained.aspx – I changed the page you referenced to point to the other one instead of trying to update the current version in 2 places.

In regards to the YUM repository, the OM 7.0 YUM repository update should be available sometime in June of 2012.

Also, OME can update firmware in a Linux environment. Support for OME is available through official Dell Support – we also have a vibrant community forum for questions around OpenManage Essentials running at http://www.delltechcenter.com/OME – questions posted to the forum there usually get answered within a couple of days by a Dell engineer, although more complex / specific cases still need to be handled through support.

Currently, OME installs on a Windows OS and can patch Dell servers running either RHEL and SLES – I don’t think that there are plans for OME to install on Linux at the moment, but I’ll have to get confirmation.

As to the memory issue, here was the sugguestion I got from someone else at Dell.

“If there is not sufficient free physical memory to perform the BIOs update, first try doing other updates, reboot the system and try to do the BIOS update. If the BIOs update continues to fail due to insufficient free physical memory, then there are 2 options. Add more memory to the system or utilize Dell Repository Manager to create a bootable.iso image that contains the BIOs image and apply the BIOs delltechcenter.com/repostiorymanager contains videos and how to documentation to guide you.”

Sorry it took a while to get back to you – I usually run point on responding to OpenManage questions but I was out last week. I hope we answered your questions.

OpenAFS.org has builds for all released Fedora 12 kernels (we actually produce them here, on lochranza). You should just be able to use one of those. We even provide a yum repository, which you can just add to your yum configuration and upgrades will then happen automatically.

Secondly – what dependency issues did you have when you tried to install kmod-openafs-1.4.11-1.1.2.6.31.12_174.2.3.fc12.i686.rpm? That’s not a dkms RPM, so it won’t be causing dependency issues with dkms – you must be installing (or have installed) something else that’s causing that problem.

Finally you do want the kmod-openafs-* variants – these provoke magic yum behaviour, which is absent when you use openafs-kernel modules (these are only really used on RHEL4 and older now, which is why their depedency names don’t match what Fedora 12 uses)

S.

SASL/GSSAPI can give you authenticated access to LDAP, but you might not be concerned about that if you’re on the inf network and can get anonymous access to our servers. If you’re interested in authenticated access though, and using openldap, then we could maybe try setting it up as a proxycaching client (essentially this involves running a local slapd which acts as a cache between you and a remote server – I can provide lots more details). As for what you need LDAP for – you can get all your user, group, etc. type of information from ldap, as well as roles, capabilities…

Toby