ProLiant Deployment and Provisioning
1748123 Members
3260 Online
108758 Solutions
New Discussion

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

 
EGray
Occasional Contributor

Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

BL460c G6 blades with 2-port GigE mezz card.

I have the latest (9.30) firmware maintenance CD set up to PXE boot and it works fine in manual mode.

The PXE boot uses the first port of the onboard NIC (not mezz NIC), as expected.

When booting into manual mode, the firmware maintenance menu comes up and it is possible to successfully update everything.

However, in automatic mode, for some reason the first port of the mezz card is used as eth0 after the initrd loads (even though the blade PXE booted from the on-board NIC). This NIC is on another VLAN, which cannot mount the NFS share hosting the ISO image, and results in failure.

Seems like a bug, perhaps the order in which drivers are loaded are changed between auto and manual mode.

label sos
MENU LABEL Interactive Firmware Update Version 9.30 - Automatic
kernel /hpfw/vmlinuz
append vmlinuz initrd=/hpfw/initrd.img media=cdrom rw root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=355492 init=/bin/init loglevel=3 ide=nodma ide=noraid nopat pnpbios=off vga=791 hp_fibre showopts TYPE=AUTOMATIC iso1=nfs://192.168.1.10/var/install/FW930.2011_0503.59.iso iso1mnt=/mnt/bootdevice

8 REPLIES 8
Cederberg
Honored Contributor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Sorry for hijacking your thread but I wondered if you could post the manual configuration as well.

Regards.
//Cederberg
EGray
Occasional Contributor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Just change AUTOMATIC to MANUAL
snoopj
New Member

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Noticing the same problem.  Trying to run on 8 new blades and it worked fine on the first, but the rest seem to move the slot 1 NIC to eth1 making the CD fail to find the mnt ISO locations via NFS.

snoopj
New Member

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

I will say that my problem might be related to long DHCP request times as well.  I booted a device up three times and one time it did get the right NIC, but a long DHCP request didn't get the information in time.  I might have to hack the netconfig.sh file and increase the length of DHCP request time.  It does worry me that I keep getting inconsistent results with the NIC order.

HS1NGH
Occasional Visitor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Can some help me to find the the firmeware for HP BL465c G7? Currently I'm having problems to install ESXi4.1 as It cannot identify the onboard NICS. Not sure if a firmware will resolve this or not.

Has anybody else had any problems?

HS1NGH
PavelS
Occasional Advisor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

It's not a bug.. this is a normal behaviour. If you want to make it use the same eth used during the PXE boot you need to hack the initrd.

 

First add these parameters:

label sos
MENU LABEL Interactive Firmware Update Version 9.30 - Automatic
kernel /hpfw/vmlinuz
append vmlinuz initrd=/hpfw/initrd.img media=cdrom rw root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=355492 init=/bin/init loglevel=3 ide=nodma ide=noraid nopat pnpbios=off vga=791 hp_fibre showopts TYPE=AUTOMATIC iso1=nfs://192.168.1.10/var/install/FW930.2011_0503.59.iso iso1mnt=/mnt/bootdevice 

ip=dhcp ksdevice=bootif
ipappend 2

 

Then you have to edit the file root/compaq/hp.sh which can be found in fs.tar.lzma archive inside initrd image. Not in inird.img main tree but in fs.tar.lzma!!

 

Change the following line: 

devarg="--device $netdevice"

with this one: 

devarg="--device $ksdevice"

Archive again fs.tar.lzma and then initrd.img and you are ready to go :). Works great for me.

Michael Pye
Occasional Advisor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Make sure you are using the HP version of ESXi4.1 available from:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ITRC-ProLiant-deployment/Firmware-maintenance-cd-PXE-boot-nic-order-changing-on-blades/td-p/4790006

 

this has all the proliant blade NIC drivers built in and should find your NICs correctly.

PavelS
Occasional Advisor

Re: Firmware maintenance cd - PXE boot - nic order changing on blades

Michael, this is not related to latest version.. nic order is os dependent, but pxe boot depends on bios.