Wrong BIOS inventory on 11G Poweredge R710 iDRAC Enterprise?

Hi jgullo,

well, from my point you did every possible step to confirm that 6.6.0 is installed. I guess in the firmware inventory it's just a display issue.

There is no need to perform any further steps.

Cheers
Stefan

Another weird one is the network card firmware; in this case there seems to be a bug in the actual firmware package.  I'm using Network_Firmware_82J79_LN_08.07.26_A00-00.BIN, and I'm on an Ubuntu Server 19.10 server (I know rpm distros are the target, but the .bin should work).  If I just run it, I get this:

root@hostname:~/Dell# ./Network_Firmware_82J79_LN_08.07.26_A00-00.BIN

Collecting inventory...
./qlogfwnx.sh: 6: [: i: unexpected operator
./qlogfwnx.sh: 8: [: i: unexpected operator
./qlogfwnx.sh: 33: [: l64: unexpected operator
./qlogfwnx.sh: 34: [: l64: unexpected operator
./qlogfwnx.sh: 37: ./: Permission denied

Inventory collection failed.
root@hostname:~/Dell#

I then extracted it with the following: 

./Network_Firmware_82J79_LN_08.07.26_A00-00.BIN --extract Dump/

I was able to edit qlogfwnx.sh and delete lines 33-36, then change the CrunchBang to bash instead of sh, and then run spsetup.sh.  After clicking through the readme, it asks if i want to proceed, and the following happens:

Collecting inventory...
.
Running validation...

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno4)

The version of this Update Package is the same as the currently installed version.
Software application name: BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno4)
Package version: 08.07.26
Installed version: 08.07.26

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno2)

The version of this Update Package is the same as the currently installed version.
Software application name: BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno2)
Package version: 08.07.26
Installed version: 08.07.26

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno1)

The version of this Update Package is the same as the currently installed version.
Software application name: BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno1)
Package version: 08.07.26
Installed version: 08.07.26

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno3)

The version of this Update Package is the same as the currently installed version.
Software application name: BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno3)
Package version: 08.07.26
Installed version: 08.07.26


Continue? Y/N:y

Y entered; update was forced by user
Executing update...
WARNING: DO NOT STOP THIS PROCESS OR INSTALL OTHER DELL PRODUCTS WHILE UPDATE IS IN PROGRESS.
THESE ACTIONS MAY CAUSE YOUR SYSTEM TO BECOME UNSTABLE!
.
Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno4)
Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno2)
Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno1)
Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eno3)
Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

Update failure. Firmware programming utility returned an error. Original firmware restored

I'm going through all this because the idrac firmware inventory is reporting that the nic firmware versions are 7.12.17; also from the USB repository in the LCC it shows the 7 version but fails to do the update.  Since the LCC shows the old version, and the way the actual update package which reports the correct version runs is weird, I'm not sure what to trust/verify.  Oh, CSIOR is enabled.

Hello jgullo,

Our engineering recommends the following:

1) Enable the system inventory collection in the iDrac configuration utility at POST.

2) Complete a soft reset either using the iDrac GUI or by connecting to the iDrac using putty and executing racadm racreset.

This might help out.

So, the racreset actually fixed the BIOS, but the network controller firmware is still showing 7.12.17 for each NIC.  

I know these are way EOL, but is it possible to get someone to look into fixing the firmware file, or possibly get some guidance on manually installing it from the extracted bin?  I don't have a windows OS to put on the box so I'm SOL since I can't use the windows 32-bit firmware package.  

As far as I can tell, I should be able to manually install the firmware from l64/qldup_prg.  I see the command line arguments from that are the following:

USAGE: l64/qldup_prg [-ver || -? || -help] || [(-filename  || -print) & -force]

It's invoked from qlogfwnx.sh.  $1 appears to be "p" to invoke programming, and I guess $2 is "-filename" and $3 is likely the payload name.  I don't know for sure though since it's invoked from the binary wrapper and I don't see how that happens.

./$prog $2 $3
ret=$?

 Any guidance is appreciated.

Hey,

have you tried to install the update via iDRAC, you can use the DUP (Dell Update Package) and in this case, the operating system does not play any role as the iDRAC works solely.

This might be a good workaround, maybe you give it a shot?

Cheers
Stefan

I've tried in LCC and it said it installed but nothing happened, can you do NIC firmware from iDRAC 6 Enterprise?  I thought it was just LCC.  Can I just try to upload the win32 exe to the iDRAC upload interface?

Man I am striking out here:

Note: DSU Ubuntu enablement is only available for 12G and 13G systems

I'll probably work on reverse engineering the firmware package and see if it's feasible to run manually. 

Oh man, I'm so sorry, looks like that this stuff is only available starting with the 12th generation servers -.-

I wish you good luck and I hope you find a solution soon.

Maybe somebody else in the community is facing the same issue and can help out.

Cheers
Stefan

Ok, I got it working.  I'm going to detail what I did but I want to hyper caution anyone against this because it's pretty risky.

First, I downloaded the BIN file.  I made it executable, made a directory called "Dump" and extracted it:

./Network_Firmware_82J79_LN_08.07.26_A00-00.BIN --extract Dump/

 Then I cd'd into the directory and ran the following getting the following output:

root@hostname:~/Dell/Dump# ./qldup_inv -print


        
                
        
        
                
        
        
                
        
        
                
        

So, there's vendorID 14e4, subVendorID 1028, deviceID 1639, and subDeviceID as 0235.  I then opened qlgcnxfw.cfg and found the line in there matching those 4 values (apologies for the awful formatting of this table):

! ven  device subven subdev crv    family    bc                    mba                   ncsi                  ump                   ipmi                  iscsib                ibcfg                 lconf                 uefi                  fcoeb                 ccm                   SystemName           
14e4   1639   1028   0235   c0     08.07.26  bc09x7a0.bin,7.10.0   none0000.000,0.0.0    ncsifwx2.013,2.0.13   none0000.000,0.0.0    none0000.000,0.0.0    ib6btv7c.01,7.12.1    6.4.0                 1.1.0.1.0.0.0.0.1.0   none0000.000,0.0.0    none0000.000,0.0.0    none0000.000,0.0.0    per710

Ok, so that means, the firmware file we need is bc09x7a0.bin which is in the payload folder.  I then ran this:

./qldup_prg -filename payload/bc09x7a0.bin -force

Which ran, with no output. Then I ran this and I got the following output:

./qldup_prg -print


        
                
                        
                        
                                Given version is same as NVRAM version.Please use "-force" option to force upgrade.
                        
                
        
        
                
                        
                        
                                Given version is same as NVRAM version.Please use "-force" option to force upgrade.
                        
                
        
        
                
                        
                        
                                Given version is same as NVRAM version.Please use "-force" option to force upgrade.
                        
                
        
        
                
                        
                        
                                Given version is same as NVRAM version.Please use "-force" option to force upgrade.
                        
                
        
        1

It also indicated "rebootrequired" was 1, so I did a power off (I had to replace the raid controller battery as well) and turned it back on, and the iDRAC reports the firmware correctly and the nics work perfectly.  I had done a power drain already so I don't think it was just that, but who knows, that's what I did and now it's working.