One of the most significant additions to server hardware in recent years has been the inclusion of on-board management facilities. HP, IBM and Dell all have their own hardware implementations, but I’ve been looking at a great piece of software for the Compaq/HP remote insight lights-out edition (RILOE) cards – the HP lights-out configuration utility (cpqlocfg.exe). This can be used (along with appropriate security credentials and an XML configuration file) to remotely manage servers from the command line, for example:

cpqlocfg -s ipaddress -v -f poweron.xml

poweron.xml is a modified version of one of the HP-supplied sample scripts which logs on to the server, sets write access and turns the power on. Full documentation on the scripting interface is available from the HP website.