The Smalley Creative Blog

Tag: server

  • Setup a Headless Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie on OS X

    Setup a Headless Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie on OS X

    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 operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The biggest difference between this guide and the hundreds if not thousands of other guides out there on the […]

  • Updating the BIOS firmware on the Supermicro X9DRW-iF

    Updating the BIOS firmware on the Supermicro X9DRW-iF

    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.

  • Flashing the IPMI firmware on a Supermicro 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).

  • Fix for Ubuntu 10.04 Server USB Install

    A bunch of tricky issues arise when trying to install Ubuntu Server from a USB drive. Also, there exists a bug in the GRUB installer that threatens to muck things up once you work through the issue of even getting Ubuntu Server installed. Today I’ll be describing how to fix all of these issues to […]