Quiet a Dell R510

Dell R510 - Get Quiet!

Thanks to reddit, I was finally able to exact some measure of control over the usually obnoxiously loud fans in my R510. It’s pretty simple:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ip of drac> -U <root or admin user> -P <password for root or admin user> raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

That enables sending commands to control the fans.

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ip of drac> -U <root or admin user> -P <password for root or admin user> raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x04

Replace the 0x04 on the end with another number. Higher for faster fans, lower for slower fans. I use 0x04 since it keeps everything cool enough while being nearly silent. On my system the second command throws an error but it does in fact seem to work fine.

I also made a systemd unit file to apply on boot since the settings do not stick:

[Unit]
Description=Set fan speed to something reasonable.

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=True
ExecStartPre=-/usr/sbin/ipmitool -I lanplus -H <drac ip> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00
ExecStart=-/usr/sbin/ipmitool -I lanplus -H <drac ip> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x04

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Edit as appropriate for your setup.

blogroll

social