The mockup lab — six iDRACs, zero hardware

Dell publishes real Redfish captures of iDRAC-managed servers — complete resource trees dumped from live machines. mcidrac’s test harness serves them with DMTF’s Redfish-Mockup-Server over HTTPS, so you can learn the whole tool surface (and we can test it) against genuine iDRAC data with no PowerEdge in sight.

You need Docker, Python 3.11+ with uv, and a clone of the mcidrac repository.

1. Start the fleet

cd mcidrac
scripts/mockup-up.sh all

First run downloads the captures (~70 MB). You get six BMCs on localhost, each a real machine’s data:

Name	Hardware	Generation	Firmware
r660xs	PowerEdge R660xs	iDRAC9, 16G	7.20.10.05
r770	PowerEdge R770	iDRAC10, 17G	1.10.17.00
r7725	PowerEdge R7725	iDRAC10, 17G	1.20.70.50
xe9712	PowerEdge XE9712	iDRAC10, 17G	1.30.07.10
basic	basic config	iDRAC9, 15G	7.10.30.00
gpu-dpu	GPU/DPU config	iDRAC9, 16G	7.10.50.00

The script writes a ready-made registry at .mockup/idracs.toml.

2. Point mcidrac at it

MCIDRAC_CONFIG=.mockup/idracs.toml uv run mcidrac --check

Six iDRACs configured. Now explore — everything in the read surface works: idrac_info shows real service tags, idrac_inventory lists the R660xs’s actual DIMMs and drives, idrac_sel pages through its real event log, and idrac_firmware reports what was genuinely installed.

3. Run the shakedown

MCIDRAC_CONFIG=.mockup/idracs.toml python3 scripts/shakedown.py

This drives the 15-tool read ladder against all six boxes over MCP stdio — 90 tool calls across two iDRAC generations. It’s the same sweep that caught a real iDRAC10 incompatibility during development (see Firmware quirks).

4. Test the write paths

Static mockups can’t change state, so the repo includes simdrac — a behavioral simulator that serves the R660xs capture for reads and implements Dell’s write semantics live: a power state machine, virtual media insert/eject, BIOS jobs that walk Scheduled → Running → Completed, read-only attribute rejections, and the SCP export task quirk.

python3 scripts/write-shakedown.py

Twenty destructive-tool steps run with outcome assertions — including the guardrails: double-mounts rejected, wrong-box SCP imports refused, powering off an already-off box returns an honest error.

5. Tear down

scripts/mockup-up.sh down

What you’ve learned

You’ve now driven every mcidrac tool against real iDRAC data. When a physical PowerEdge shows up, the only new things are a registry entry with real credentials — and consequences.

Bonus: a proving ground for local models

The fleet is also the honest way to answer “is this local model good enough at tool calling to trust with my hardware?” Point an agent at the mockup registry and watch whether it calls the right tools with valid arguments — a model that garbles a fake R660xs would garble your real one. That’s the core of running mcidrac with a local model.