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Re: Upgrade Firmware Remotely on Proliant servers - Help?

 
Dan_394
Advisor

Upgrade Firmware Remotely on Proliant servers - Help?

Hi,

I've donwloaded the latest firmware cd from the hp website, and have tried to remotely install the firmware on windows and linux servers. I have been able to do all the windows servers but none of the linux ones work.

I noticed that the linux servers (rhel 5.2) don't have any hp tools installed e.g from the psp package. Could that be why the firmware update isn't working on there? Is there another way to remotely update them? If I do need to install a remote hp package to enable remote updates can you please tell me which package it is?

Thanks
Dan
2 REPLIES 2
Mark Ostroski
Advisor

Re: Upgrade Firmware Remotely on Proliant servers - Help?

The smart update manager on the firmware CD does work for linux, but I also found it to have two limitations: it uses network ports which may be blocked by a firewall, and it needs root access via ssh and cannot make use of public-key authentication. I think it works if you specify the root password as a command line parameter but that is a seriously bad idea. I'm not aware of any HP packages that would need to be installed for it to work.

I worked around this by putting the contents of the firmware CD (/compaq/swpackages/ I think) on an NFS share and running the "hpsum" command locally on the servers. See the firmware CD user guide for command-line parameters. In the absence of NFS, you can rsync a copy to the remote server. If you strip out the windows packages (.exe files) the firmware CD contents are <300MB.

More advice about hpsum on linux:
- Watch out for the express mode option. It reinstalls all firmware and might even downgrade without your explicit consent. AND it ignores other important parameters.
- Silent mode works great and allows you to update all firmware without a GUI or user interaction.
Michael Leu
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade Firmware Remotely on Proliant servers - Help?

Another possibility is to modify the firmware cd to make it PXE bootable:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1007139

(Beware of very long thread, which was started by another Dan ;-)