Fix Loud Fans in Dell PowerEdge Servers, Without Taking it Apart!

There are many invasive techniques to lowering your lab server’s decibels. Here is a way to do it… command line style!

First, make sure you do this from a Linux server. I used Ubuntu.

apt install ipmitool

Now you have two choices, you can make them even louder, or you can make them whisper quiet.

Make your server Simma Donna with:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -U root -P password raw 0x30 0xCE 0x00 0x09 0x07 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x07 0x00 0x02 0x02 0x02 0x00 0x00

Replace “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” with your servers BMC, IPMI, iDRAC management address (all of these acronyms point to the same hole)

Replace “password” with YOUR PASSWORD

As soon as you press enter, it will immediately get quiet.

If you want to make it louder (or negate the previous command), take the same steps but the last command is a little different:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -U root -P password raw 0x30 0xCE 0x00 0x09 0x07 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x07 0x00 0x02 0x02 0x02 0x01 0x00

And just like that your server is back to jet engine mode.

There is theory behind what we just did here, and if you want to learn about it, lets be honest you would not have made it this far into this post. You just want less noise, less complaints, think about renting out a data center or even better building one.

Go reverse engineer something, why are you still reading this.

Till next time, Ciao