I got a Dell 1600SC dual xeon 2.8 on the 9th with a Dell DRAC III remote access card and have been fighting to make the DRAC work since the 12th. In my RHEL3 system this hardware combination works great, but in the new RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 system the DRAC3 accepts no keyboard input after RHEL5 loads, thus making it impossible to login to the OS through the drac remote console redirect. If I try and hit a key to enter the grub interactive setup I got "Warning: Remote Console is Not Available", I was disconnected from the drac console redirect, and server was stuck and never came up (waited 5 minutes.) Had to power cycle server to bring back online.

Tech support suggested the lack of keyboard input acceptance by the drac was because the RedHat Enterprise 5 and CentOS5 kernel does not load the PS/2 keyboard driver which is required for the Drac3 to accept keyboard input. (a drac4 works, but that's not an option for this server I would guess icon_sad.gif)

At tech support's suggestion, I added
atkbd.set=2
to the /boot/grub/grub.conf file
but rebooting had no change - still text input is accepted to enter the bios, but no text input to login to the OS or even to choose a kernel from grub interactive (which completely freezes the system.)
I also added
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 -word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=2 serial console
which I saw in /etc/grub.conf (which is not linked to /boot/grub/grub.conf but instead a separate file) but still no luck - no keyboard input accepted through the drac3 remote console to login to the os through the drac console redirect.

Has anyone solved this hardware/software combination? Or is RHEL5 simply not going to be backwards compatible with the Dell DRAC3 hardware?

I've been working on getting a solution for this for a week now and no closer at this point; frustrated and disappointed that I've not been able to get this to work as I did not forsee the drac hardware would be incompatible with RHEL5. I thought it was working at a level closer to the hardware itself.

Any ideas, suggestions, or solutions would be greatly appreciated.

(ticket being worked is 4446186PLNT if anyone has solved this before - a sincere thankyou in advance)