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PE2950 Broadcom Netxtreme II Firmware failure RH ES5
I have a PE2950 with 2 Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 cards installed. The system is running Redhat ES5.6 and everything was working well until we attempted a firware upgrade last week. SUU was used to upgrade the system, including the 2 NICs and one of the Firmware updates failed.
At this time , 1 NIC is working fine while the system log reports that the firmware is not running on the other. Since the firmware is not running, the driver does not seem to load. I can see the NIC using the lspci command, but the firmware update program can't see it and dup_inv does not enumerate it. So, it seems I can't use the normal update process to get the firmware loaded.
It seems to me that I need to find a way to get the firmware loaded that does not require the access via the driver or a way to "reset" the card to it original firmware. My guess may be way off though and since I have not done this before, I decided to see if someone has advice before moving forward.
Any help/advice is appreciated.
Anonymous
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October 4th, 2011 13:00
You can use the SBUU and the System update DVD to run the firmware updates outside the OS. Here are some instructions on how that is done.
Updating Your Server Outside the OS
1. Download the System Build and update utility.
2.<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
3. Burn the ISO file to a disc.
4. Place the disc in your server and configure your server to boot to the disc.
5. When you come to this screen, select Firmware update.
a.
6. Download the System update DVD
Download all ISO file segments into an empty subdirectory on your local hard drive. After you have downloaded all the file segments, run the following command to create the ISO file:
copy /b om* om651_suu_a00.iso [Windows]
cat om* > om651_suu_a00.iso [Linux]
Note: If the wildcard format above does not bring the file segments in the right order, run the following command instead to create the ISO file:
copy /b om651_suu_a00.iso.001+om651_suu_a00.iso.002+om651_suu_a00.iso.003 om651_suu_a00.iso [Windows]
cat om651_suu_a00.iso.001 om651_suu_a00.iso.002 om651_suu_a00.iso.003 > om651_suu_a00.iso [Linux]
Use your DVD burning software to create a DVD from om651_suu_a00.iso.
Pasted from <<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
7. Then you will come to this screen below. At this point, take out the disc, and put in the Server Update DVD repository you created. Then select the appropriate option and click Continue. *To obtain the latest SUU, go to support.dell.com/drivers and enter your service tag, then look under Systems Management for Server Update Utility.
a.
7. Next, it should analyze your system and tell you what you need to update, and then let you update your system.
a.
8. After you see the above screen, you should be able to see what needs to be updated and what does not. Once you tell it to update, you will get a screen that shows which updates were applied, and which ones were not.
a.
Now your system is up to date
Let us know if it works.
Thanks.
PaulGD
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October 27th, 2011 08:00
Thanks for the reply and suggestion. I just got to try this yesterday and it did not work. The process worked well but the system was still unable to see the NIC as something to be updated. On the menu from the System Update DVD, I selected thechoice to list system hardware and both NICs showed up ,but when I selected update and inserted the OM651_suu disk, the broken NIC did not show up as a choice to upgrade.
I am thinking that the either the original failed firmware update has left it is such a bad state that the interfacing with it from the an OS is just not going to work or I really just have a bad NIC.
Is there a "lower level" way to interface with the NIC to force a firmware upgrade that I could try.
Anonymous
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October 27th, 2011 09:00
Sorry to hear this did not work. Since the firmware is having issues updating inside and outside the OS, I would agree that this would seem more hardware related. That card may need to be replaced. If the server is under warranty, or you purchased the expansion cards directly from Dell, they still may be under warranty. In which case I would suggest contacting Dell to see about replacement.
Built into the firmware update there should be a lnxfwupg, this utility does have some commands you could try to clear or restore the nics nvram, and then try to force the update. I would not try this on any working nics, just the one that has failed the update and is not currently working correctly.
Here is some documentation on it, it is a bit dated but should still apply.
data.versiontracker.com/.../Readme.txt
Let us know if you decide to try it and if it works or not.