Hi, I need to automate iso installation on Dell server. For such systems we have host itself and another ip for the iDrac management interface.
The flow that I need to automate is:
- Connect a USB with iso DD image to the system
- reboot the host (can be done via ssh directly or from iDrac virtual console that connects to the host)
- After the reboot, I don’t have ssh connection to host but in the KVM (virtual console) I can still see the rebooting process and communicate with it. for example pressing F2 F11…
- Change the BIOS setup to start from USB and complete the installation by filling all requiered parameters.
For that purpose I tried using the pywinauto (we have a RobotFramework + Python2.7), but the problem that I’m facing that the KVM (virtual console) is recognized as one window (with no children or other controls). So I can type keys like: ENTER SPACE Arrows(Up,Down,Left,Right) TAB F2 F11… but I’m not able to get or read the content of the console shown in the screen, what enforce me to use hardcoded steps and use sleeps between steps.
Something else that I thought that can help is connecting to the iDrac via SSH and with racadm api to try to get that conent. but I couldn’t find a subcommand (that racadm support) that gives such information:
So am out of options :S, I know about other tool called Sikuli that works with image recognition which I used before to automate iOS and I found the reiability of it hard to trust so am not going to try it again.
Please advise if there is such a tool that can grap that console content. BTW, the console can be opened with different plug-in types such: Native, Java, Htmls (only in iDrac 8+) but even with Html5 the control that contains that console is a that I cant really extract anything from it (beside that I need to cover older versions of iDrac)
Thanks in advance.