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Update on firmware discovery methods

 
chuckk281
Trusted Contributor

Update on firmware discovery methods

Joe was looking for iLO info:

 

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Can anyone send me a few ideas on how to query the iLO to get Firmware information on a server that doesn’t have an OS?  I believe this can be done on a server via iLO Scripting or CLI script.  And if I have a list of the iLO IP addresses, I should be able to do it all from one script.

 

Can anyone verify that ability and point us to a source for the CLI scripting commands?

 

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Lots of input:

 

From David:

It’s in the output from the Get_Host_Data.XML sample script that can be used by HPONCFG or CPQLOCFG.  Output of the first 7 lines follows which contains the info…

 

C:\Program Files\HP\hponcfg>hponcfg /f get_host_data.xml

Firmware Revision = 2.07  Device type = iLO 2  Driver name = CpqCiDrv

<GET_HOST_DATA>

<SMBIOS_RECORD TYPE="0" B64_DATA="ABgAAAECAPADP4DayX0AAAAAAwf/////SFAAUDU4ADA1LzAyLzIwMTEAAA==">

  <FIELD NAME="Subject" VALUE="BIOS Information"/>

  <FIELD NAME="Family" VALUE="P58"/>

  <FIELD NAME="Date" VALUE="05/02/2011"/>

</SMBIOS_RECORD>

 

Alternatively, if you ssh to iLO you can also get it with the command ‘show /system1/firmware’

 

</>hpiLO-> show /system1/firmware

status=0

status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED

 

 

/system1/firmware

  Targets

  Properties

    version=P58

    date=11/08/2006

  Verbs

    cd version exit show

 

 

</>hpiLO->

 

Reply from Joe:

All, thanks for the input. We also have no connection to the iLO on these systems. Any other method?

 

Input from Stephan:

It's had to get info without a connection apart from booting on a iso.

Do you have connection to anything like a OA or is it standalone servers?

 

From Chris:

Considering the SPP does not contain any other firmware or drivers for the SL335 other than the SA P220/222/420/421 series, I don’t find that a bit strange you cannot get the embedded SATA controller firmware version from HPSUM.

 

And if you don’t have access to the iLO, your only other way for bare-metal reporting is some form of PXE boot, which you already have with Altiris.  HPSUM does not allow you to define the output location of the reports, so scripting unique report filenames that contain say the server name is not possible.  Currently, HPSUM will create report file names with the date and time stamp.  So, you could offset the  job execution by 1 minute, and only execute it one at a time.  That’s not ideal, but the only possible solution I can see, until an OS is landed on the target systems.

 

What is the intended purpose of the Firmware Reports?  Is it to examine what systems needs to be updated?  Why not just have a deployment task that updates to the latest SPP?  If HPSUM exits with any other Exit Code than 1, there is a problem and the deployment job would fail (assuming the use of Altiris is being used to deploy the OS.)

 

Reply from Joe:

Thanks for the help. These systems are to be interrogated for firmware and then brought to certain levels (not necessarily the latest) in preparation for build out. Looks like PXE booting them (960) is the only option which is not appealing.

 

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Any other comments?