BIOS and IPMI Firmware update for Supermicro X11SSL-CF

[Ceetan]

Howdy free Nas community! Long time no see! I hope everyone is well now onto the question: suppose you want to update both the BMC/IPMI firmware and the BIOS, is it better to first update the BIOS And then the BMC, or is the other way around better? Reason I might want to do this is because I ran into the IPMI KCS error again.

Question 2: Does any one of you have experience with out of band updates? I have an activated license, but I see, to remeber you had to upload a bios file, and i do note rember if it was the entier zipfile or just one of the files in the bios zip.

Thanks for the help in advance.

 

[dlavigne]

Did you decide upon a workflow for this? If so, did it work out?

 

[Ceetan]

Whoops. Remembersd this now. Perhaps I should have necroed this thread instead of maling a new one. I do not remember my work flow anymore, unfortunatly. @dlavigne

 

[Yorick]

I just did this.

Firmware update via IPMI Maintenance / Firmware Update, followed by reboot. Note this is a reboot of the IPMI only, it's not the whole system. FreeNAS stayed running.
The update PDF warns to not keep IPMI config through this update - I ignored the warning and kept the config, but that might not have been optimal. If config is reset, "from-scratch IPMI setup" would come next.

Meanwhile create a FreeDOS stick via Rufus, copy BIOS files to it. Only because I don't have an oob license. Open iKVM, reboot into DOS stick, "flash <biosfile>", and power-cycle boot into FreeNAS.

Alternatively, 18 bucks gets you SFT-OOB-LIC at CDW, which enables BIOS update from IPMI.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Don't they provide an EFI based BIOS update, nowadays? So one could drop the USB DOS drive dance? Copy to EFI partition, boot into EFI shell via IPMI KVM, start update?

Kind regards
Patrick

 

[Ceetan]

I have an SFT-OOB-LIC so that is covered

Thank you @Yorick. Maybe you can fill in these blanks?

My server has been running well for almost 3 years no, but for various reasons I have a need to update bios and BMC-firmware.

I remember doing this once before, and as a consequence I renmember somethings happening:

Mobo got cleaned out, so boot order was lost.

Fan threshold also got nulled. Is there a good way to view the current ones for backup purposes?

This is the one that scareds me the most. If i remember correctly, IPMI log in credentials got reset to default, and I do not remember what those were orhow they were determained: IPMI-login is pretty crucial, and not somthng you want to loose. Is there a way for finding out the defaults if needed?

(From your post I would gather a setup would happen?)

 

[Yorick]

There are some dire, red, bolded warnings in the IPMI update instructions to not keep settings as otherwise ipmi would not work properly. I didn’t read that far and so I kept my settings.
I’m assuming that if this is done properly, both IP address and login are gone. That means having a dhcp server in the oob network so you can even get to ipmi after update. Not for the faint of heart. Default login should be documented and findable in the ipmi user guide.

bios settings were gone for me as well, I redid boot settings.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

ADMIN/ADMIN for Supermicro ...