To celebrate Halloween I’ve decided to put together a guide that will show you how to install Raspbian Jessie, the (as of this writing) most current version of the Debian …
Category: Administration
Yesterday evening I posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to flash/update the IPMI firmware on the X9DRW-iF server from Supermicro. Today I'm going to explain how to flash the BIOS on the same hardware. If you're not familiar with what a BIOS firmware flash is, there's no shame in not knowing, here is a good explanation. I've found the documentation out on the web to be scattered at best, and a little bit confusing. This is why I thought I'd put together a start-to-finish guide here, where we'll create our own custom bootable ISO, and use it to update to a specific BIOS firmware for the X9DRW-iF.
I recently tasked myself with bringing IPMI up to date on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF server. This can be quite dangerous, as a bad IPMI flash can break IPMI in a way that requires you end up having to mail your hardware (RMA) to Supermicro to get it re-flashed. As such, I'm not hugely fond of doing these sorts of things through a web interface, as it depends on the network, and the Supermicro web interface doesn't give you much in the way of feedback during the firmware upgrade process. Today, I'll be sharing what I found to be the most stable way of flashing the IPMI firmware on an X9DRW-iF. We'll be doing so from an OS that is installed on the hardware itself -- in our case from CentOS 6.6 (this would very likely work just fine on a Debian-based OS as well).
In this post, I’ll begin to demonstrate how beneficial it can be to automate some of the more tedious tasks involved with setting up a new install of OS X …