Firmware Update Bug on the SC440

[Gordan Bobic]

There appears to be a bug in the BIOS update process for the SC440. It
downloads the firmware that reports itself as 1.0.5, when it is actually
1.5.0. The updater seems to conclude that the version it got is older than
the BIOS and doesn't update.

The downloadable updater from the support site is also named 1.0.5 but is
actually correctly listed as 1.5.0. Also, I'm not sure how much it affects,
but the updater itself from the downloadable package (no idea if it's
different from what's in yum) is a 32-bit binary that requires 32-bit zlib
to run. This may not be installed on all 64-bit machines (I tend to remove
all 32-bit packages from my 64-bit machines). The shell archive for the
downloadable updater didn't run properly for me, but after manually
extracting the binary, ungzipping it and installing zlib.i386 it ran and
updated fine.

Why exactly is there this culture of multiple-wrapping things in this
manner? What is the point of gzipping and wrapping the BIOS update into a
shar (which does very little of any relevance) when the resulting
executable still ends up uncompressing itself when running? Sounds like
there is a completely pointless layer of compression and a completely
pointless layer of wrapping there that makes things more difficult to
troubleshoot when they don't work while serving no useful purpose when it
does work.

Gordan