In order to manage DRAC passwords I've relied on running a number of racadm commands to remotely update the root password periodically. This process was fairly reliable up until the release of the DRAC 5 when the root user was moved from index 1 to index 2. Since this caused me to have to perform a version check on every DRAC password change I decided to eventually create another user in index 2 on all older DRACs to keep the process working. While this was a bit of a chore I discovered a second problem that illustrates why keeping the user index table consistent is important.

Since IT Assistant has the ability to execute omreport/omconfig commands against Discovered Systems and any DRACs they may contain I attempted to move the entire process to IT Assistant. With my servers split into DRAC5 and not-DRAC5 groups I ran the following command through IT Assistant to update the root password and was astonished to find that the omconfig command cannot access user 1 on a DRAC 3 or a DRAC 4.

omconfig chassis remoteaccess config=user id=1 newpw=notcalvin confirmnewpw=notcalvin

The same problem occurred when running omconfig commands directly against a server with DRAC 3 or DRAC 4 cards and a recent version of OpenManage Server Administrator.
Since it worked fine on the DRAC 5 group, it seems like the problem with the omconfig command was due to this completely unnecessary change to the DRAC user properties. Keeping the basic properties as consistent as possible would be advantageous for managing Dell servers as well simplify how we use tools like IT Assistant. The DRAC has long been a reason I buy Dell servers and as new models are released please keep in mind that changes like this can cause major headaches while being easily avoided.