Jims' Network Diary – musings of a network admin

Had the strangest experience with mounting virtual Media using Dell Remote Access Cards. I was carrying out an install of CentOS 5.5 with 6 CDs, and had to mount 4 images in total, one after the other.

Steps are:

1. Log in to the DRAC
2. Go to “Remote File Share”
3. Stick in creds with sufficient access rights to the share in question
4. Stick in the image path, using forward slashes instead of backward slashes, and in my case, referencing the server by IP instead of hostname seemed to get the best results

Once you’ve finished with the virtual media, for instance when having to swap disks, I’d expect to have to click “Disconnect”, then edit the path to that of the next ISO, then click “Connect”.

However, this consistently failed to mount the media.

The solution I found after playing around for a while is as follows:

1. Go to “Console / Media”
2. Choose “Configuration”
3. Drop the Virtual Media “Status” drop-down box to “Auto-Attach”, click Apply, confirming the prompt relating to dropping any active vFlash session
4. Drop the Virtual Media “Status” drop-down box to “Attach”, click Apply, confirming the prompt relating to dropping any active vFlash session
5. Go back to “Remote File Share” and edit the path to the media accordingly, then click “Connect”.

Weird sequence of actions here, but this has definitely proved consistent, and allowed me to finally carry out the Linux install remotely.

Server was a new PowerEdge R310, with the Enterprise DRAC card, v6.

Recorded here for my future reference as much as anything, but will hopefully prove useful to someone.