Dell 2950 / PERC5 FW Upgrade

[Stephen Dowdy]

Alexander Dupuy wrote, On 01/21/09 22:48:

> Thanks for this script.  I wasn't aware of dmidecode (which is not
> Dell-specific, and which works quite well on other hardware, and even
> QEMU VMs).  I found that `dmidecode -s bios-version` is a bit simpler
> than the dmidecode|egrep|grep|sed pipeline that you use to get the BIOS
> version.

The reason i don't use the newer style "bios-version" stuff is that i
have too many older OS variants that have a dmidecode that doesn't
support it :-(  dmidecode is definitely progressing and getting more
useful/powerful as time goes on.
(and yeah, it was lazy coding to "get the job done")

FWIW, dmidecode even *mostly*/partly works on Cygwin under Windows ;)

> Interestingly, your approach of using the text in /proc/scsi/scsi to get
> SAS backplane firmware revision only seems to work on my systems with
> PERC RAID - on a system with just the SAS 5/i embedded controller, the
> backplane doesn't appear in /proc/scsi/scsi - only the disks themselves
> show up.  However, this is at least a step forward for me, as I couldn't
> see it on any system before.

I'm not sure how you might *easily* obtain the SAS backplane version
using ubiquitous tools for a SAS5/i only system.  dmidecode doesn't
seem to report it (that i can see, but it may be encoded in some of
the OEM specific records), and 'ipmitool' fru reports don't seem to
have any version info, even if any of the objects might be the SAS BP.

All the systems i've wanted to get SAS BP from had PERC controllers.
Let me know if you find something new there.  My group probably has
some SAS 5/i systems, i'd have to hunt down, though.

> @alex

--stephen