Updating the firmware of an HP msa1500/msa1000 using Debian

For RHEL and SLES, HP supplies a utility for doing "in-band" (that is via the FC) firmware updates of the msa1500/msa1000, delivered as an RPM. While it may be possible to convert this RPM using alien and run it (it seemed to run, I didn't risk trying to use it) the utility is graphical and requires several gnome libraries and their whole dependency stack to be installed, which is not something I usually have installed on my servers. I noticed in the msa1500/msa1000 Command Line Interface User Guide and the Firmware Updating Guide documents, that there is a way to update the firmware via serial. Here is what I did:

UPDATE

I had problems updating a particular msa1000 that was running 4.32, no matter what I tried the xmodem transfer failed. So I grabbed the GUI update utility for RHEL4/amd64 and used alien to convert it to a deb. As mentioned above I had to install a ton of X Windows libraries and use ssh X forwarding to run the application remotely, so I used a freshly installed machine that I could just easily reinstall (using d-i preseeding). It ran ok and I was able to update the firmware. After updating the firmware, just as a test, I tried the serial method of updating and it still failed. So I suspect that it was something with my setup rather than a limitation of the 4.32 firmware.

Thanks to bkero for help debugging.


Matt Taggart <matt@lackof.org>
2007-09-24