As is usually the case, I was working on a project and was trying to understand the alerting capabilities of the Dell iDRAC7. Specifically, I was working on trying to configure SNMP, SNMP Traps, and Email alerting to keep track of critical hardware events. I keep trying with a variety of different settings, settings that I KNOW work on other systems, yet I keep getting the following message:

[callout]RAC0225: Sending the test mail failed.[/callout]

RAC0225-SendingtheTestMailFailed

I messed with various settings and tried to find a way to ping a name from the iDRAC (no, logging into it via SSH doesn’t allow you to do that).

In the end, I found that the solution that seems pretty random to me.

  1. On the iDRAC web interface, navigate to Overview > iDRAC Settings > Network
  2. iDRACNetworkSettingsUnder the Common Settings section, you HAVE to set a Static DNS Domain Name in the iDRAC network settings. And by setting I name, I mean ANY name. Yes, that’s right. I actually put smudwag.mud in there and suddenly my alert emails work like a charm.
    iDRACNetworkCommonSettings

This is obviously not some of Dell’s finest work, but this bug has indeed been identified by others as well. Let’s hope a future firmware release fixes this issue with iDRACs.