Here are two ways to update the firmware on Dell iDRAC6 remote access cards. Both methods require downloading the BIOS from Dell and extracting it from the bundle. For example, this is the 1.70.21 firmware: mkdir /tmp/dell cd /tmp/dell wget http://ftp.dell.com/esm/IDRAC6_FRMW_LX_R299265.BIN Grab this and extract like this: cd /tmp/dell sh IDRAC6_FRMW_LX_R299265.BIN –extract ./idrac6-1.70.21 The firmware [...]
We sometimes see problems updating our Dell machines to the latest firmware, ie. update_firmware -y fails: Running updates… – Installing dell_dup_componentid_00159 – 1.4.7Installation failed for package: dell_dup_componentid_00159 – 1.4.7 aborting update… The error message from the low-level command was: Could not parse output, bad xml for package: dell_dup_componentid_00159 Dell have been unable to tell me [...]
Dell distributes its OMSA software in RPM packages and even has a yum repo available so you'd think that updating to the next version would be as simple as yum update, right? Wrong! You have to remove the old version first, and then install the new version. Oh, and you also need to stop the [...]
We've had a bunch of new servers in place for around 3 months now. They seem to be working well and are performing just fine. Then, out of the blue, our monitoring started throwing alerts on seemingly random servers. Our queues were building up – basically, database performance had dropped dramatically and our processing scripts [...]
I use cobbler to provision our new Dell servers, which is great but it needs the MAC addresses of the servers to identify each machine. Previously, I have been doing this manually: log in to the DRAC web interface launch the java console rebooting the server go into the BIOS navigate to Embedded Devices manually [...]
It seems that several people have been having problems getting Dell OMSA 6.2 to work correctly on CentOS 5.4 x86_64. Specifically, the software does not detect any storage controllers, and therefore also doesn't find any disks. eg. [root@b034 ~]# omreport storage pdisk controller=0 Invalid controller value. Read, controller=0 No controllers found. After a little investigation, [...]
