1 - Updating Firmware and IPMI

Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 8 November 2017 16:09

So, after taking posetion of my little server, one of the first things I did was explore updating the BIOS and the IPMI.

We were one version behind on each from the looks of things, so I updated the BIOS to 2.1b and the IPMI to 3.13.

You can buy a license key from SuperMicro to update IPMI over the network, but you have to, well, go buy one and submit your mac address and download windows tools and crap.

Easiest way is to boot a USB stick, disguised as a floppy disk image.

Which is great, until you have a bios image that is 4mb in size and an IPMI firmware that is 16mb in size!

Thats when you have to get creative.

where going to create a 64Mb disk image.

first, create an empty image. 


fallocate -l 64M test.img

Now, we need to create a new partition table and set it up

This gives us an LBA geometry of 63 heads, 64 cylinders, 32 sectors.

So lets create a dos MBR. 


fdisk test.img
o
w

Now, lets download the freedos 1.2 floppy boot disk;

http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip

Unzip it into the same directory as our test.img

Now, lets boot dosbox up

inside dosbox, 


imgmount 2 test.img -size 512,63,16,130 -fs none
boot FLOPPY.img

FreeDOS 1.2 will boot, Select english and then choose 


No - Return to DOS

You will be dumped to an A: drive.

Lets put some code into our mbr 


fdisk /mbr

We need to quit and restart dosbox, remount our image and reboot our floppy quitting again, we can now format c: drive 


fdisk

Now we can create our primary bootable partition

(another quit + reboot / remount our image) 


format c: /S /V:BOOTIMAGE

From there, we have a nice bootable image of about 64mb.

Now getting stuf on there is much easier, instead of "imagemount 2" We now change that to 


imagemount k: test.img -size 512,63,16,130 -type hdd

Under linux copy whatever zips you need to say, /tmp/testing then in dosbox 


mount q: /tmp/testing
rescan

Then you can go into k: and copy the stuff from q: etc. When all done, burn test.img with unetbootin!

tags: Firmware, Homelab, IPMI

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