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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
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13 <a href=
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</a>
21 <div class=
"title">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</div>
22 <div class=
"date">21st November
2011</div>
23 <div class=
"body"><p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
24 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
25 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
26 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
27 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
28 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
29 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
30 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
31 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
32 the tools to do so.
</p>
34 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
35 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
36 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
37 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P>
39 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
40 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file
</a>
41 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
42 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
43 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
44 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
45 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
46 be activated on the first reboot.
</p>
48 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
49 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
50 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p>
56 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
58 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
60 'XML::Simple' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple',
62 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
65 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
66 system("yum install -y $pkg");
71 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
77 sub run_firmware_script {
78 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
80 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
83 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
85 if (
0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
86 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
88 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
92 sub run_firmware_scripts {
93 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
94 # Run firmware packages
96 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
97 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
98 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
99 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
100 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
108 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
109 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
114 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
117 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
119 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
120 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
122 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
126 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
127 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
128 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
129 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
132 for my $url (@paths) {
135 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
137 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
138 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
142 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
143 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
149 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
153 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
154 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
155 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
156 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
157 my $filename = shift;
159 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
161 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
163 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
165 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
167 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
168 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
169 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
171 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
172 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
174 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
176 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
178 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
181 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
182 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
184 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
185 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
187 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
188 for my $path (@paths) {
189 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
190 push(@paths, $cpath);
198 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
199 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
200 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
201 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
205 <div class=
"tags">Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>.
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