Today I had to reset a Dell R520 which I dedicated to a new web service. The server was previously allocated to a different customer, so I wanted to wipe previous data, configurations and logs from it.
The only non-trivial part was to erase the Lifecycle Controller logs which in theory are meant to be persistent across the server life span. There is however a semi-documented way to clear it via the wsman interface and tool, which is part of the wsmancli RPM package found in CentOS. wsman uses SOAP web services exported by iDRAC. A similar (but not identical) tool for windows is called winrm, but I never used it.
The command would be:
wsman invoke -a "LCWipe" http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/root/dcim/DCIM_LCService?SystemCreationClassName="DCIM_ComputerSystem",CreationClassName="DCIM_LCService",SystemName="DCIM:ComputerSystem",Name="DCIM:LCService" -h [iDRAC ip] -P 443 -u [username] -p [password] -c Dummy -y basic -V -v
Unfortunately on my previous CentOS install this leads to an error:
Connection failed. response code = 0 SSL connect error
stracing a bit, it turns out that the error is in nss which is used by libcurl called by wsman. It was enough to update nss to solve the error.
Note that wiping the Lifecycle Controller memory, iDRAC settings were equally zeroed so you have to reconfigure it beginning with 192.168.0.120/root/calvin.