Critical Dell BIOS Update

[John Buttery]

* On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 05:29:18PM -0600, John Buttery wrote:
>   Don't suppose you know where I could find Debian packages for the
> OpenManage stuff (specifically, omconfig)?
>   Although, at this point, I'd settle even an RPM or tarball that I
> could manually unpack.  :)

* On Monday 16 April 2007 20:03, Michael E Brown 
<Michael_E_Brown at dell.com> wrote:
>Search the archives. There are debian "user-contributed conversions"
> of the RPMs.

  Of course; I should have thought of that myself; sorry about that.

  I installed these three packages:

dellomsa_5.1.0-5_i386.deb
libopenipmi0_2.0.2-2_i386.deb
openipmi_2.0.2-2_i386.deb

  ...from...

ftp.sara.nl/pub/outgoing/dell/binary-i386

  ...and some of the commands seem to work, but some of them generate 
errors like this:

----- cut here
root:~/packages# omreport about
rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See 
README.Debian.
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory 
(2)

Product name : Information Not Available.
Version      : 3.1.0
Copyright    : Copyright (C) Dell Inc. 1995-2006. All rights reserved.
Company      : Dell Inc.

root:~/packages#
----- cut here

  The "cannot open Packages index using db3" bit is the constant across 
the commands that don't work.  I found this article which kinda looks 
like a similar problem, but I can't find any followups to it (unless 
any followups went to the person's personal email as he 
requested)...and he's got different packages installed, so although the 
error message is the same, it may be a different root cause.

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2005-January/018737.html

  The failure of 'omreport' to function isn't a problem in and of 
itself, it just makes me worry as to whether 'omconfig' is going to do 
what I want it to do when I try to reconfigure the array with it.
  Just to recap, my original problem was that I had a two-disk RAID-1 
array with a degraded disk that I tried to replace the disk in; I used 
dellmgr and did what I thought would put the new disk in as a 
replacement, but actually wound up re-creating the one good disk as a 
single-disk RAID-0 "array".  I'm looking for a way to take the 
current "array" and combine it with the replacement disk and get back 
to a two-disk RAID-1.  My initial thought was to use 'dellmgr' for this 
purpose...if it can go one way, surely it can go back?  The suggestions 
I've gotten from the list point to omconfig, though...which I'm not 
opposed to, as long as it works.  This is the command line I'll be 
running if I can't do the job with 'dellmgr':

omconfig storage vdisk action=reconfigure controller=0 vdisk=0 raid=r1 
size=132g adisk=0:0,0:1

  In 'dellmgr' under "Objects -> Logical Drives" I have one logical 
drive (numbered 0).  Under "Configure -> View/Add Configuration" I 
have "RAID Ch-0" with one disk "ID 0" that's online (that's the 
single-disk RAID-0) and a blank spot in "ID 1" which used to contain 
the new disk before I removed it from the chassis (to make sure the 
controller didn't try to assimilate it into the RAID-0 array).

  I hate to ask for what kinda amounts to hand-holding on a public 
mailing list, but I'm worried that I'm on the verge of blowing away 
60-odd gigs of data if I don't get this right the second time.  :)  
Thanks in advance for any advice!

-- 
John Buttery <johnb at academicsuperstore.com>
System Administrator