iLO 4 firmware update failure, stuck on "Checking HP Secure Digital Signature"

[Protonus]

Welp, I'm at my wits end with this server.  We tried power draining it again fully, then booted it up clean - verified that the iLO was in a normal state.

This time I pushed the bin file for intermediate version 2.10, up to the ESXi datastore directly, so the file was local.  I then tried to do the firmware update via hponcfg using the Update_Firmware.xml script.  While the script executed, it did eventually time out, because the iLO went right back to the "Checking HP Secure Digital Signature" status in the GUI, and it's once again stuck at 1% flash progress!  This is the same thing that's happened every time we try and update this iLO, no matter the version or update method.

I think the iLO itself needs to be replaced.  It's a ProLiant DL360p Gen8 - the iLO firwmare itself is on the motherboard, correct?  Would this require a new motherboard to resolve? 

[MDella]

Just as a side note, I have two servers that have this EXACT same problem (going from v1.50 to 2.70 and stuck). Note that both these servers have since been pulled out of production and stuck on a shelf. They have been powered down for a couple months and we just looked at them recently and still stuck in the iLO "Checking HP Digital Signature, please wait ..."

After a few days of searching around, its looking like the iLO is basically a brick and not likely to ever come back. We are putting these two servers up on EBay because of this problem. There is probably someone out there that doesn't care that the iLOs are bricked.

Marcos

BTW, ours are iLO4 on DL-360p (gen 8 servers).

[xrobau]

After doing some reverse engineering, this is an issue with the ANCIENT versions of ILO4. If the SYSTEM CLOCK is after 2015-ish, the certificate validation process will crash, and the upgrade process will hang at 1%.

The only way to fix this is to do a DIRECT FLASH. This means you need to turn the 'ILO Security' switch ON, and then boot the machine to Linux. Download the latest linux package. which is (at the time of writing) 2.81: https://downloads.hpe.com/pub/softlib2/software1/sc-linux-fw-ilo/p192122427/v213013/CP051872.scexe

Run 'bash CP051872.scexe --unpack=.' and then './flash_ilo4 --direct'

That disables all the verification and checks, and directly overwrites the ILO flash from the OS. I had to do that with a pair of BL460 G8's, and then I had to do a physical power cycle to remove the error light, but after that everything updated fine.