There are several things to think about when taking control of another computer, the Operating System running on it, the speed of your network connection and the tools you have at your disposal.

How To Take Control Of Another Computer

Operating System

There are 3 main choices of Operating system that the computer you want to take control of might be running, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Fortunately Mac OS X is based on BSD so the tools you would use to take control of it are the same as you would for Linux, simplifying things some what!

All Dell DRACs come with a default account set up as root / calvin which is a huge security risk if left!

The web interface doesn’t let you change the password but the firmware does when you boot the server.

A second way to change the password is with the racadm tool, if installed, at the command line! This means you don’t have to reboot that precious production server!

In DRAC 4, the first index slot is root by default. In DRAC 5 and 6, index 1 is Administrator, index 2 is root.