ESM update tools

[Landreth, Kevin]

> There is no really good way to do this under Linux at present.  The
> tools that do exist are tempermental at best. That includes the Dell
> Update Package (DUP) for the Baseboard Management Controller, which
> may not work on Debian.

> Sorry, but DOS diskette/CD/whatever is the "easiest" way...

Easy is relative here.  I've got 10,000+ machines to do these updates on
so a CD/DOS boot disk doesn't scale.  Now I COULD pxe boot a DOS disk
but then there isn't an automated way to do this.  I'd have to manually
configure a pxe target file for each mac address. As well as create a
boot disk for each

Searching around the yum repo's, I found a three choices here:

Bmc-tools (http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/el5/i386/dell-bmcflash/)
DUP (http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/el5/i386/dell-dup/)
Rip the file out of the .BIN file and hope that I have all the right
libraries.  

One of those has be fairly reliable from linux.  At least for most maybe
10 PowerEdge chassis. We obviously have more types than that but only
about 10 of them have an ESM.  Which enterprise support highly suggested
that I update the ESM prior to the BIOS updates.  Bios updates are
pretty simple but I would hate to brick a server.

When you say termermental, does that mean "sometimes bricks the machine"
or "well, doesn't work on all updates" ?  because if it's just sometimes
the updates don't take and everything is fine, I can work with that.

By the way, I appreciate your feedback!

Thanks,
Kevin Landreth, RHCE