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Rebooting old DELL PE 2850 with iDRAC 4 via SSH

Bartosz Maciejewski -

It has happened to me that I have to reboot a non-critical machine which is a DELL PE 2850. Of course with such old hardware it's iDRAC requires Internet Explorer 7 or something, and it has all the compromised ciphers that modern browsers don't allow. Fortunately for me, I also set up and enabled SSH on this iDRAC years ago. SSH is not so straightforward forward either, but with a little tinkering it finally let me in.


First try:

# ssh 192.168.3.20
Unable to negotiate with 192.168.3.20 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

So I added this old cipher to ssh once:

vpn# ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -c 3des-cbc root@192.168.3.20
Unable to negotiate with 192.168.3.20 port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-dss

Another try with a different one finally let me in:

#ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss -c 3des-cbc root@192.168.3.20  
The authenticity of host '192.168.3.20 (192.168.3.20)' can't be established.
DSA key fingerprint is SHA256:kjGSLZzM7TshY8nW+6s90yD2gfebNMJOCwHn7ixm1yM.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.3.20' (DSA) to the list of known hosts.
root@192.168.3.20's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@192.168.3.20's password:

Dell Remote Access Controller 4/I (DRAC 4/I)
Firmware Version 1.33 (Build 08.04)
[root]#

Now I was able to reboot this machine with simple:

[root]# serveraction powercycle