Hello, my name is Michael and I am an SST here in the Systems Management Team at Dell. Today we will be covering offline updates using firmware repositories to OpenManage Enterprise.
When performing offline updates it is crucial to have the required ports open and available for traffic to both download files and push files to the iDRAC.
In this process OpenManage Enterprise downloads the file first to a built-in share, and then pushes to the iDRACs. during the update process. Ports required are 137, 138, 139 and 445. This information can be found in the user guide as well.
We will test in this tutorial with a network repository created from Dell Repository Manager which was covered in a previous video on how to create repositories.
When connecting to share we must include the catalog name in the path. I will use CIFS for this tutorial but OpenManage Enterprise supports NFS, HTTP and HTTPS.
All work the same in regard to failure. When we configure the connection to the share OpenManage Enterprise requires the full path name, backslash, catalog.xml. Let me give a demonstration Here under catalog management I created 22 and 22-1 as my test shares.
We select 'Edit' and we can see the path is drm/22 and then the catalog.xml We will test on 22-1 as well, and we'll see this one is a CIFS share requiring administrator and password. And we can hit the test connection and see the test is successful. Now you hit 'Finish'.
Typically there are three common types of failures. Ports, Permissions or DUP files, meaning the DUP files are not in the repository and only the catalog exists. This will still give you a successful test connection as the test will execute and connect to the catalog.xml, but when applying the update to the iDRAC it will fail because the files are not in the repository.
We will demonstrate that shortly. OK, so 22-1 is our catalog only. I can demonstrate that here, here's two catalogs in here. So I have a system that's pointing directly to 22-1, we can check compliance. And then we would view the report. So in this iDRAC - the c6420 - we see that we're not in compliance.
So I'll test the iDRAC only, and I'll select 'Make Compliant' and 'Update Now' and then we will visit this job. And we've received a failure. I did test this previously. And so there's a problem downloading the update, and that makes sense because there's no update files to download.
OK, we'll go back to the 'Configuration', 'Firmware/Driver Compliace' compliance tab. We'll now check the 22, check compliance. Now we'll view the report and see the available updates. Pretty much the same catalog, we see the idrac available we can now select that, 'Make Compliant' and 'Update Now'.
We can see that we are now downloading and verifying the package, and we can also verify in our share that we see all the update files including the .xml file. All right, we can see that the download was verified and is downloading the file, and has created job, and that the remote service is ready.
So this job is now in the iDRAC, and performing the update on the iDRAC. This was a small example of the type of failures one may experience when performing offline updates.
Things to check: Ports, Permissions and files that are located in the repository. Of course if the files aren't there we'll need to download the files and create the repository correctly. That wraps up this tutorial thanks for watching, have a great day.
