Unable to apply offical BIOS update on 440SC - tail: cannot open `+78' for reading

[Tom Chiverton]

As the 'urgent' BIOS updates to my SC440 are not yet in the 'yum' 
repositories, I need to be able to run the updates 'old style' by running the 
file at 
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R168540&SystemID=PWE_P4_SC440&servicetag=&os=WNET&osl=en&deviceid=159&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=6&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=2&libid=1&fileid=229114

However:
# wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/SC440-010500.BIN
--14:19:16--  http://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/SC440-010500.BIN
           => `SC440-010500.BIN'
Resolving ftp.us.dell.com... 143.166.170.10
Connecting to ftp.us.dell.com|143.166.170.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 348,503 (340K) [application/octet-stream]

100%[=============================================>] 348,503      286.30K/s

14:19:19 (285.55 KB/s) - `SC440-010500.BIN' saved [348503/348503]
# chmod u+x SC440-010500.BIN
# ./SC440-010500.BIN --version        
Dell BIOS Update Installer 1.1
Copyright 2006 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved.

tail: cannot open `+78' for reading: No such file or directory

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format

And obviously the flash doesn't run for the same reason.

Google suggested:
# export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 
but
# ./SC440-010500.BIN --version   
Dell BIOS Update Installer 1.1
Copyright 2006 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved.

./flash: error while loading shared libraries: libz.so.1: cannot open shared 
object file: No such file or directory

Anyone got this to work ? Dell's online tech support refuse to talk to me 
about the SC440 I bought from Dell UK because I'm not in the US (*eh* ?). 
Dell UK online wont talk to me because they 'dont support' the SC400 yet.

My bios is:
# inventory_firmware
System BIOS for PowerEdge SC440 = 1.2.0
and v1.3.0 was rated 'urgent' in October - 
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/previousversions.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&impid=-1&vercnt=6&osl=en&SystemID=PWE_P4_SC440&catid=-1&deviceid=159&releaseid=R168540&releasetype=BIOS&servicetag=&os=WNET&formatcnt=2&libid=1

If the main support site doesn't carry working BIOS updaters, can they be 
pushed through the yum repositories ASAP ?

All this is Fedora Core 7, and the SC440-010500.BIN file's md5 hash is 
2f460b29b393cd5fa26776028432b114

-- 
Tom
The experiment may be considered a success if no more than 50% of the
observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence
with theory.