Ian Forde wrote: > Heck - even at 10 servers, PXE installations should be the > norm. So to be told that one has to use a DOS floppy is a little... > well... grating... >
I've had good luck in the past using memdisk from syslinux to load a floppy,CD,or "USB stick" image into RAM as part of a PXE boot - and then using IPMI serial redirection to carry out the update (except you can't see *graphical* DOS firmware updaters (WFT?!!!) but even those seem to have unattended operation options). Qemu v11 + etherboot (I use the "pcnet" PXE rom image that ships with recent Debian) is a very good tool for prototyping / checking images.... Still a crappy bodge, but a bit less so... To give Dell their due, a lot of their problems are with their suppliers, and at least this: http://www.ducea.com/2007/08/27/dell-bios-firmware-updates-on-debian/ ... is a lot easier on Dell systems than most others (yeah there is http://packages.debian.org/sid/flashrom for other systems which I've had 100% success with, but if it breaks you're going to need to start pulling chips). Tim. -- South East Open Source Solutions Limited Registered in England and Wales with company number 06134732. Registered Office: 2 Powell Gardens, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 1TQ VAT number: 900 6633 53 http://seoss.co.uk/ +44-(0)1273-808309 _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
