how to update firmware for R710 hardware

[Lisa Giaime]

I have a pile of R610.  I never tried to use a yum repo for the  
firmware updates.  However, I did try a few things. The R610's have  
the universal server configurator.  When that points to ftp.dell.com,  
it is crazy slow.  Updates can take all night.  Instead, I built a  
local ftp server for this.  I saw what I think are the same XML error  
messages when I did this.  I say "I think" because I worked on this  
back in January/February and my memory just isn't that good.  The  
problem then turned out to be that I wasn't fetching the xml catalog  
file.  The firmware updates are broken into directories like bios and  
lifecycle.  They aren't grouped by machine type.  Every one of those  
directories has an xml catalog that needs to be correct in order for  
the firmware updates to succeed.  Looking back at the thread that  
Robin cites, it looks like there is a bad xml catalog for this  
package.  I found on the R610's that if I could not run a piece of  
firmware at the OS level, it was possible to run it at the Server  
Configurator Level and vice versa.  Once I got past the offending  
package, all of the other firmware would run by my chosen method.  I  
also found that some firmware updates are pre-requisites to others but  
that the system wasn't able to figure this out on it's own.  For  
example, if my server was on the original bios level, I had to run a  
bios update and reboot before I could update some other piece.  The  
important thing there was that I had to select only that piece to  
update.  When that happened, I would get wonky error messages that  
gave no idea of what the problem was.

How I managed to have success with getting all of the firmware updated  
on the R610 was to just try alternate methods for installing a package  
that failed.  Once I got past the bump, the rest of it would usually  
go pretty smoothly.

HTH-
Lisa

On Sep 23, 2010, at 8:23 AM, Robin Bowes wrote:

> On 23/09/10 13:05, Eric Doutreleau wrote:
>> hi
>>
>> i have setup the yum repo for firmware in my R710 machine.
>> I m running centos 5.5
>>
>> but when i run update_firmware --yes i got the following messages
>>
>> Running updates...
>> /	Installing dell_dup_componentid_00159 - 2.1.9Installation failed  
>> for
>> package: dell_dup_componentid_00159 - 2.1.9
>> aborting update...
>>
>> The error message from the low-level command was:
>>
>> Could not parse output, bad xml for package:  
>> dell_dup_componentid_00159
>>
>>
>> Does someone know how to solve that problems?
>
> I reported the same problem in August:
>
> http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-August/042956.html
>
> I'm still seeing it.
>
> R.
> -- 
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> http://www.theshackshakers.com/
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