PowerEdge BMC updates with Debian

http://www.enrici.com/2013/04/12/flash-bmc-dell-sous-debian-wheezy/ has the good infos. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Running "bmcfl32l -i=payload/bmcflsh.dat" didn't produce the desired results. Eventually tried running "./spsetup.sh" from the directory with the extracted files and the BMC firmware appears to have been successfully updated. Huzzah.

ftp://ftp.dell.com/published/Pages/index.html is where you want to start to find the non-Windows versions of the update packages.

Procedure:

• get .BIN file with firmware update from Dell's site.
• unpack downloaded .BIN file like so: cd /var/tmp; bash 1950_ESM_Firmware_XCVN0_LN32_2.50_A00.BIN --extract BMC-FW.
• Add "[arch=amd64,i386]" between "deb" and "http://http.us.debian.org/..." of main Debian archive entry in /etc/apt/sources.list
• dpkg --add-architecture i386
• apt-get update
• apt-get install libgcc1:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libsmbios-bin
• dpkg-reconfigure dash let /bin/sh be bash, because Dell's /bin/sh scripts are really bash-specific
• cd into unpacked BMC firmware binaries directory (/var/tmp/BMC-FW in example above)
• ./spsetup.sh
• ipmitool mc info to confirm the BMC is running the new firmware
• If you care to, remove the newly installed packages, tell dpkg to forget about i386, and make /bin/sh be a real POSIX shell again

If I ever have another Gen 9 PowerEdge...

• Do the DRAC update over the web UI. Get the firmimg.d5 file from the update package and just upload it via web browser.
• ESM/BMC update happens as above
• BIOS update can be done with /usr/sbin/dellBiosUpdate in the smbios-utils package.
• Dell SAS 6/iR controller firmware and BIOS code is flashed using LSI's sas2flash program. Look for it in an older ("P21" from 2011 worked for me) version of the SAS 3018ER package on the Symbios Logic/LSI/Avago/Broadcom support site.