Several Proliant firmware upgrades broken on RHEL6 Linux

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

After upgrading several different Proliant servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6 (RHEL6) we found that several firmware upgrades which used to work perfectly on RHEL5 do not work on RHEL6:

• All disk firmware upgrades for SmartArray, all Proliant and disk types.
• HP Lights-Out 100 (LO100) Remote Management: LO100 firmware upgrade.

We submitted two cases to HP Support (4637100874 and 4640405705, respectively). After many months of fighting with Level 2 Support over whether the problem is real or not, they finally confirmed that the problems are real. HP Engineering is "considering" updating the firmware scripts and/or installation instructions at some unspecified future date.

In order to save all you HP customers running RHEL6 systems from upgrade problems and fighting with HP Support, I have documented my findings in our Wiki page wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/it/HP_Proliant_firmware_upgrade

Comments to Ole.H.Nielsen@fysik.dtu.dk are most welcome.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Why would you run the upgrade with 'sh FILE.scexe' when the instructions says to run './FILE.scexe' ?

I ran disk firmware upgrade CP016376.scexe recently without any problems on SL6.3.

Slightly off topic: Running the .scexe in screen or nohup is a really bad idea too. At least with the .scexe for upgrading a Smart Array controller to 5.70.

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

>Why would you run the upgrade with 'sh FILE.scexe' when the instructions says to run './FILE.scexe' ?

Because that's easier to do, and I always did this successfully on RHEL5. Please note that HP's instructions say "FOR EXAMPLE" in stead of "MUST".  Using './FILE.scexe' requires an extra step of making FILE.scexe executable which HP never documented.

Please note that the LO100 firmware update NEVER works on RHEL6, here HP's installation instructions are useless.

The fundamental problem is HP Engineering's programming error in the scripts that I have analyzed: The source a script file as ". CPINIT" in stead of the correct ". ./CPINIT". Please read the wiki-page which I referred to see the details.