Firmware updates

[Michael E Brown]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 11:25:03PM +0000, dell at bobich.net wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have recently tried updating the firmware from the yum repositories, and 
> I'm not having much luck.
> 
> On a 440SC, the SAS-5 firmware got updated, and update_firmware said it 
> needed a warm reboot to take effect. I did shutdown -rf now on it, but the 
> machine never came back (I did it remotely - yes I should know better). 
> I'll go to the data center in the morning to see what's wrong with it, but 
> I'm wondering what to expect - is it just waiting at the POST screen 
> saying something like "press F1 to continue", or should I be expecting 
> something worse to await?

I would expect either an error shutting down or a post error of some
sort. I have yet to ever see a machine completely dead after a firmware
update. (With one exception, we had one where we had to clear CMOS to
get the machine back alive after a BIOS update attempt).

> On a 1650 it never gets that far. The firmware packages download, but 
> after a while it fails:

It looks like it is timing out trying to inventory your RAC card.

I would be interested to see if you can manually run the inventory for
your RAC. Go into /usr/share/firmware/dell/dup/ and look for a subdirectory
with "racdupie.sh" in it. Run "./racdupie.sh -i" to manually inventory and
see if that completes properly. Send the output to the list, please.

Basically, I'm still working on the error handling and reporting. Lots
of the DUPs have weird error conditions in them, and so for now I just
bail when I run into them.
--
Michael