Starting with the 1.30.30 firmware release of iDRAC7 in Q4 of 2012, Dell introduced two features which will enable you to run RACADM (Remote Access Controller Admin) commands without having to remember the exact syntax for complex commands. These features are Autocomplete and Command Traversal, which are supported in iDRAC7 FW RACADM (SSH, Telnet and Serial).
Autocomplete and command traversal are available with the iDRAC Enterprise and Express licenses only. The basic management license does not support these new features & the user privileges with this license are the same as RACADM command’s supported in the admin shell.
RACADM Autocomplete
With Autocomplete, there is no need to memorize different RACADM commands supported or complicated syntax. With this feature, when you type few letters of the command, pressing “TAB” will either autocomplete the command if there is only one command starting with the letters typed, or provide a list of all command options starting with the letters typed. You can also use this feature to complete different options supported by the command.
This feature is applicable under RACADM shell only. Once you login in to the firmware racadm, it will be in the “admin” shell. You first have to type the command “racadm” to change the shell to “racadm”.
Command Traversal
Command traversal is part of the Autocomplete feature which will allow you to traverse to a different racadm group and perform get and set operations. This feature will work only on racadm shell.
In the Racadm shell, typing “CD”, and pressing “TAB” will list your available groups. To traverse to one of the groups, type few letters of the group and type TAB. The group name will autocomplete and you can traverse to this group by pressing enter.
After traversing to a group, you can get a list of supported attributes by running the get command. You can also use the CD command to further traverse sub groups. To get current settings for a specific attribute, type the get command followed by an attribute name. To set an attribute you can run “set” followed by the attribute name and attribute value. All of these operations are also autocompleted by pressing the “TAB” key.
To traverse one level back to the previous group from a subgroup type “cd ..“. To exit from racadm shell and move to admin prompt type “Exit”.
For more information on RACADM, refer the following resources: