BMC packages for dell-bmcflash/firmware-tools?

[Michael E Brown]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 11:07:01AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On 8/9/07, Michael E Brown <Michael_E_Brown at dell.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 10:04:26AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> > > On 8/9/07, Michael_E_Brown at dell.com <Michael_E_Brown at dell.com> wrote:
> > > > So I was out for a week and I'm woefully behind on email... :(
> > > >
> > > > First things first, I promised somebody about three months ago that I would have perc5/sas5 flash utilities in "a couple weeks". Well, I am just putting the finishing touches on this today. I have a few perc5 packages out there today which I published a couple days ago, with the rest (sas5) to come later today. (official announcement to follow)
> > > >
> > > > The BMC turned out to be a lot nastier than I thought. I'm working on it, but I'm not going to even attempt an ETA because I know I'll just miss it.
> > > > --
> > >
> > > Even though you are behind... thanks for your help. All I need now are
> > > the various diagnostic tools in an rpm format.. and I will have a
> > > bootable centos-5 cdrom with most of the system and pci firmware
> > > images that you have up and ready for you.
> >
> > Sweet. I suppose you saw Matt's blog post and wiki page for using
> > revisor to do this and that is what you are doing, right?
> >
> 
> Actually I started with revisor... got frustrated of trying to get it
> to work on EL-5 and went for the livecd solution that was listed in
> the OMSA. It isnt as user friendly as revisor.. but trying to get all
> the bits working was running up an internal deadline.

Well...

I have a devious idea, if you are up to it. I dont think I have the
resources to do it myself, but if you want to help, I think we can pull
it off.

How about a script that can automatically generate a live CD image from
the current list of update packages and the latest CentOS5 bits?  If you
could help with that, I could easily run a weekly live-CD build and post
it on linux.dell.com.

So, a Live CD with:
    CentOS 5
    OMSA
    firmware-tools
    All of the firmware-tools payload packages
    anything else we can put in there

I will look around and see what I can do about the diagnostics stuff. I
know a few people to talk to.

I would really like to see something that we can regenerate on a weekly
basis with the latest sources rather than something that we simply
generate once and see stagnate.

I am willing to run the scripts on an internal machine that I have, and
host the content.

What do you think?

> > Couple more notes:
> >
> > 1) I've added system names for almost all of the bios images. This means
> > that the rpms should be named something like
> > "system_bios_PowerEdge_2800...", rather than
> > "system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x2468...", which should be much more
> > user-friendly.
> >
> 
> Yeah this caused some problems with livecd in the database.. it would
> say that package XYZ was not there even though it was.. it came down
> to some issues with conflicts.

Details? I can fix if there is something wrong with my RPMs.

> > 2) firmware-addon-dell 1.4.4 should finish building in about an hour or
> > so that fixes a typo that kept actual bios flash from occurring.
> >
> 
> Ahh.. well I needed to add some documentation to the items to get it
> more user friendly. I decided to use xfce as the desktop as it cut
> down the disk space needed. I got all the images I could get livecd to
> recognize to install in 570 MB image

Hint: use "hardlink" in the %post to hardlink identical files before you
generate the image. There are *many* duplicate BIOS images that will
hardlink nicely.

> > 3) all of the packages (aside from #2, above) are already posted
> >
> > 4) payload packages are building/extracting now and should be up in the
> > firmware repo within an hour or so.
> >
> > Anybody feeling adventurous is encouraged to try them out. I've tested
> > on two machines with three different cards (perc4, and two variations on
> > perc5). I dont have sas5 to test with, so I can only do dry runs, but
> > the commands use the same format and args, so I am pretty confident that
> > it will work ok.
> >
> 
> Will let you know today. Will put the images up somewhere they can be
> snarfed without killing my network (1 cd for image, 1 cd for
> .src.rpms). Like I said.. I just need the diagnostic packages in rpm
> format and I am in my happy place :).

Will definitely like to see that.

--
Michael