{"id":3,"date":"2009-08-24T23:57:18","date_gmt":"2009-08-25T05:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=3"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:27:20","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:27:20","slug":"suggestion-for-ibm-make-an-updatexpress-that-supports-pxe-boot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=3","title":{"rendered":"Suggestion for IBM make an UpdateXpress that supports PXE boot!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Downloading firmware for\u00a0 Intel Servers is a bear.\u00a0 IBM has tried to make it easier by providing an update CD that has all the various subsystems in it.\u00a0 This is a pretty good idea.\u00a0 But the problem is, in my world, I need to PXE boot all the servers to an image or run a package on the individual machines.<\/p>\n

For example, if you have an HS21 xM server, you can go to this page <\/a>and you are shown all the different subsystems that you can update.\u00a0 My goodness!\u00a0 That is a lot of work.\u00a0 Not to mention that you may not know what a lot of them are.<\/p>\n

IBM is doing two things right:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 They let you update packages right on the command line if you’re running Linux.\u00a0 This is great if I want to update the BIOS on my machines.\u00a0 I just scp the binary to all the machines and run the update and reboot.\u00a0 Boom!\u00a0 Just like that the BIOS is updated.\u00a0\u00a0 Nice job IBM.\u00a0 In fact, they even let you change BIOS\/CMOS settings from the command line.\u00a0 Much easier than waiting for the boot up screen and pressing F2.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 They have a tool UpdateXpress System pack that has all the updates in it.\u00a0 This tool is basically a bootable CD that has all the updates.\u00a0 You stick the CD in the system then reboot the system and it updates ALL of the system components.<\/p>\n

So that’s what they’re doing right.\u00a0 And the thing is, IBM is soooo close to getting it perfect.\u00a0 What do they need to do?<\/p>\n

Well, I need the functionality of #2 in a PXE boot environment.\u00a0 Turns out you can’t network boot that UpdateXpress CD that you created.\u00a0 If you could then think how great it would be?\u00a0 You could just take that and put into xCAT and boot all nodes to this PXE boot environment.\u00a0 But they don’t.<\/p>\n

I for one, can not afford to take a CD to every machine in my server farm and watch it boot up and do it.\u00a0 I need a PXE boot environment.\u00a0 On the other hand, it takes me a good 2 hours to go through IBM’s website and get all the binary updates that run on the Linux command line.\u00a0 Once I have them all I had to create my own PXE boot environment that would run under xCAT.<\/p>\n

I took about 3 days of work to make such an environment work under xCAT’s service kernel.\u00a0 So when I want to update HS22s or LS22s I do:<\/p>\n

nodeset compute runimage=http:\/\/mgmt\/install\/updates\/hs22v.tgz<\/pre>\n
You can get my images for HS22’s and LS22’s here<\/a><\/p>\n
I’ve been creating images like this since 2003 for IBM hardware.\u00a0 I hope that soon I won’t have to anymore.\u00a0 Before I was making DOS images and PXE booting those with memdisk.\u00a0 It’s great that I can now do everything with Linux.\u00a0 IBM is almost there.\u00a0 Once they get the Update Xpress to PXE boot, we’re golden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Downloading firmware for\u00a0 Intel Servers is a bear.\u00a0 IBM has tried to make it easier by providing an update CD that has all the various subsystems in it.\u00a0 This is a pretty good idea.\u00a0 But the problem is, in my world, I need to PXE boot all the servers to an image or run a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,16],"tags":[6,9,7,919,8,5,10,917],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2855,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/2855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}