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I know what DRACs are (it's Dell's LOM). I asked whether the DRAC bios stuff required a reboot.

Just looked at the docs, it's apply and reboot which makes sense.

Oh, I forgot that you also have to manage the certs on the LOMs. Luckily browsers still allow you to bypass expired certs by default.

I wonder if you can still get into machines with the old SHA-1 stuff?

That's why serial consoles are better IMO.

Yeah, I'd consider the DRAC completely independent of the BIOS question. There are also OS tools - I believe Dell's is called OMSA - that can flip some of the switches in the BIOS (I remember this from having to mess with NUMA settings at one time), but they still needed to reboot.

As far as the crypto stuff, it's an issue. I fairly recently had to tweak some old 11th generation Dell Servers and tried out the DRACs, but Java really doesn't want you to use RC4 - I remember that being the dealbreaker. Nicely, someone put a conatiner up on Docker Hub that dealt with it https://hub.docker.com/r/domistyle/idrac6/

I have rarely needed to make changes, but if I recall correctly there were some settings that would take effect immediately, and others that required a reboot. I'd need to refer to the documentation.

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