Just shy of three months ago I was fighting with updating the iLO firmware (IPMI and extras) and as I recounted, even when you select downloads for RHEL (which is a supported operating system on those boxes), you’re given a Windows executable file, which you have to extract. But at least, you can use the file you extract, to update the IPMI firmware remotely.
Well, if it wasn’t for a small little issue that the fans are going to get stuck at 14 KRPM until you also update the BIOS. It wasn’t obvious how much of a problem that is until we got to the co-location last week and… “What on Earth is this noise?” “I think it’s our servers!” screamed on the backside of the cabinet.
Since one of the servers also had some other hardware issues (one of the loops that keep the chipset’s heatsink gave way — I glued it back and applied a new layer of thermal paste after scraping the old one), we ended up bringing it back to the office, where today, after repairing it and booting, it became obvious that we couldn’t leave it running at any time with that kind of noise. So it was time to update the BIOS. Which is easier said than done.
Step one is finding the correct download — the first one I found turned out to be wrong, but it took me some time to understand that, because BIOS update has to be done with DOS. And that brought me back to a very old post of mine (well, not that old, it’s just an year and a half ago, now that I see), and its follow-up which came with a downloadable 383KB compressed, 2GB uncompressed bootable FreeDOS image. Since getting sysrescuecd’s FreeDOS to do anything other than booting and playing its own demos was impossible.
So when I actually get to run the executable in the FreeDOS image … what I come to is an extremely stupid tool (that, I remember you, will not work on Windows XP, Vista or 7) to create an USB drive to update the BIOS… lol, whut?
The correct download is, once again, for Windows even when you select RHEL4, and it auto-extracts in a multitude of files that include the BIOS itself some four different times, and would provide some sort of network update, as well as “flat files” (which you can use with FreeDOS), a Windows updater, an ISO file, and an utility to build an USB stick to update the BIOS itself.
If you count the fact that this is for a server running Linux, you now just involved two more operating systems. And the next trip to the co-lo we’ve got work cut out for us, updating server by server the BIOS, and the IPMI firmware (hoping that the new firmware actually have a reliable SOL connection, among others).
But to avoid being all too negative with HP, it’s still better than trying to do standard sysadmin work on an Apple OS X Server install on a Mac Mini. OS X Server combines UNIX’s friendliness, with Windows’s remote management capabilities, Solaris’s hardware support, and AIX software availability. But that’s a topic for another post.
