Accessing the Virtual KVM on a DRAC5-Equipped Dell Server with IE7
I’ve talked before about Dell’s remote access card, DRAC5 in a previous post. Although a great tool, sometimes just accessing certain features is a pain. Surprisingly, current DRAC5 cards don’t have very good support for IE7 or Firefox, which comprise the lion’s share of browsers out there.
Although I haven’t found a good fix for Firefox browsers, there are some settings that can be configured to allow IE7 to properly install the IP KVM and Virtual Media pluginss of the DRAC5 card.
Here are the steps needed to fix IE7:
1. From the “Tools” menu, select “Internet Options
2. Go to the “Security” tab and highlight “Intenet” and select “Custom Level”
3. Scroll to “ActiveX control and plug-ins”, and set the sub-setting “Automatic prompting for ActiveX controls” to “Enable”
4. Click “OK” a couple of times to save settings and then try to access the DRAC5 KVM plugin again - it should properly install now.
If you don’t have the above settings, when you try to install the DRAC5 IP KVM activex plugin, IE7 will boot you back to the DRAC5 login page. It will continue to do that until the above settings are in place. Why Dell has not updated the plugins yet is beyond me, but with the above settings, you can get around the problem.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Thanks for the tip, it was very useful. I was getting rather frustrated by not being able to install the ActiveX component.
February 17th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Thanks man!
March 31st, 2009 at 11:42 am
While I finally got the ActiveX control installed, and upped the timeout web session to max. 1920 seconds, it still pops back to the login dialog in IE 7 when it feels like it at any moment.
*sigh*
April 9th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Thanks for this! Very unimpressed with Dell - iLO virtual media on HP servers works without a hitch on IE7.
April 30th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Thanks, helped me out as well!
May 26th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
damn nearly went into the data center to kick the cr@p out of the DRAC, fortunately i read your tip.
saved me a plane ride to lay the smack down on that piece of sh!t.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:33 am
Thanks man! I was close to start my cussing against DRAC. Now I start doing it about IE7