SettingLcdPanelText

Setting the LCD Panel Text on the PowerEdge x9xx series

Chris Walker on the linux poweredge mailing list [1] figured out how to set it. Now where can you find this information except on the mailing list? I've still no clue on how to read the current value.

Chris Walker cwalker at pixar.com
Fri Feb 2 16:08:17 CST 2007


If you can get omconfig working, that's probably your best option. If
you couldn't (like me), here's another option. I'm running FC5.

This example assumes that you have IPMI-over-LAN set up on your host
answering to the hostname 'baltar-ipmi'. I'll also assume that you have
an admin user configured on your BMC with the user/pass
"rootuser"/"rootpass".  This will write the string 'foobar' on your LCD.

% ipmitool -H baltar-ipmi -I lan -U rootuser -P rootpass -L ADMINISTRATOR raw 0x6 0x58 193 0 0 6 0x66 0x6F 0x6F 0x62 0x61 0x72
% ipmitool -H baltar-ipmi -I lan -U rootuser -P rootpass -L ADMINISTRATOR raw 0x6 0x58 194 0

The first command sets the user-defined string to use on the LCD. The
second informs the BMC that it should use the user-defined string
instead of the default text.

The raw IPMI command is the tricky part.

0x6             This is the network function (NetFn) number for Applications.
                See the IPMI spec for more information.
0x58            The operation number for setting system information. IPMI spec (page 572)
193 or 194      The selector for setting the Dell LCD text. 193 means
                set the string to this, 194 controls what string to show
                in the LCD.
0               Which chunk of 16 bytes of text you're editing (62 bytes are allowed).
0               Text encoding. This should always be 0 for ASCII.

6               This is the length of the string you're encoding.
                'foobar' is 6 characters. You can send 14 characters with each chunk.
                This is because you can only send 16 bytes total (1 byte for text
                encoding, 1 byte for length, 14 bytes for text).
0x66 0x6F 0x6F 0x62 0x61 0x72
                The ASCII codes for 'foobar'.

I haven't quite figured out how to get more than 14 characters on the
screen. Also, I think this stuff should work fine if you're using the
IPMI driver instead of IPMI-over-LAN.

Hope this helps.