Firmware updates

[dell at bobich.net]

On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Michael E Brown wrote:

>> 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).

It seems to have been a POST error. It was saying "Boot device not found, 
press F1 to reboot, F2 to run setup."

Switching it off and back on cleared the problem, and all the RAID stripes 
are working correctly.

So the message that it needs a "warm reboot" to take effect appears to 
have been innacurate. It didn't come back until it was cold-booted.

>> 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.

./racdupie.sh -i
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><SVMInventory lang="en"><Device 
vendorID="1028" deviceID="0009" subDeviceID="0009" subVendorID="1028" 
bus="0" device="8" function="0" display="Dell Remote Access Controller - 
ERA/O"><Application componentType="FRMW" version="3.37" display="Dell 
Remote Access Controller - ERA/O"/></Device></SVMInventory>

It worked now, but I did first do yum update, which installed a new dup. 
Now update_firmware works, too. Unlike on the 440SC which has all 
firmware updates available via yum, however, it only has system BIOS 
updates available for the 1650. Probably unsurprising considering that the 
1650s are considerably older.

> 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.

Fair. :-)

Gordan