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April 11th, 2016 02:00
Dell R610 Firmware Update Process
I'm about to embark on a journey of getting two Dell R610s updated to the latest BIOS. They look to have, possibly, never been updated (yikes!).
When the systems boot, here is what I'm seeing as far as current versions go:
First System
---
BIOS Version: 1.2.6
iDRAC6 Configuration Utility Version: 1.33
iDRAC6 Firmware Revision Version: 1.20.01
Primary Backplane Firmware Revision: 1.07
Second System
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BIOS Version: 1.1.4
iDRAC6 Configuration Utility Version: 1.26
iDRAC6 Firmware Revision Version: 1.10.13
Primary Backplane Firmware Revision: 1.07
I've been reading horror stories all night of people saying they brick their boxes by just upgrading to the latest BIOS version out there (v6.4.0, right?), so I wanted to reach out to you (as I saw you have replied to some other posts like this) to see if you would be willing to guide me through this (i.e., what to do first, second, etc) in order to get everything up to date without bricking my boxes :)
I did download the Dell Repository Manager and created an R610 Repository, as well as exported a "Linux" ISO bundle (i.e., Name: "System Bundle (Linux)PER610 v575" / Version: B155520.575) with all the latest bits, so my hope is that once we get some of the "hot button" items up to date, I'd like to be able to run the latest bundle against these boxes to get *everything else* up to date in one shot once it's safe to do so (if that makes sense).
Thanks in advance for whatever guidance anyone can provide!
Joey DiJulio
joey.dijulio
2 Posts
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April 11th, 2016 20:00
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the reply.
I guess I'm a little gunshy to just, as you say, "boot into the ISO and proceed".
Check out some of these sorted tales that are making me a little skiddish:
en.community.dell.com/.../19625540
en.community.dell.com/.../19595170
The first one being just from only a year ago - and on a system with a a *newer* firmware than I'm running (Remember, my BIOSes is v1.1.4 and v1.2.6!).
Are you telling me that *NONE* of the problems people have ran into are present anymore when running the ISO that gets spit out from the Dell Repository Manager (i.e., when using it to build up an R610 Repository to create / export a "Linux" ISO bundle)?
I guess I'm curious as to just what changed in the last year to prevent the bricking problems from happening? It seems that people have been doing this in roughly the same manner you are suggesting but are running into issues - I don't want to be in that boat!
Thanks for the additional clarification / assurance.
PS: From my research it seem as if the biggest issues are the Life Cycle Controller and DRAC firmware levels before patching. Remember, all of mine are near original (from waaaaaaaay back in 2009, or whenever these were first released). Will the ISO be able to know to update them first, automatically? Also, it was hinted that you needed to do incremental updates along the way by Dell technicians on some of the posts I've read (i.e., they suggested always doing them in bite sized chunks, rather than single / large jumps). Will the ISO do the incremental upgrades, or have the newest versions gotten smart enough to be able to take those large leaps without issues on the R610s?
PPS: I also noticed that when hitting F10 on both systems (to get into the Life Cycle Controller) it would crash, with a rather ugly errors:
http://tinypic.com/r/2mq3p5w/9
and
http://tinypic.com/r/2eb8ieb/9
Is that a cause of concern?