dell

Upgrade firmware for perc 5/e in Debian

Dell create easy install firmware, drivers, management utilities and such for Redhat. These seldom work in Debian, often because of the different package management systems they use (rpm for Redhat / dpkg for Debian) .
I had to upgrade the firmware on a PERC 5/E raid controller, and we mainly run Debian where I work, so I’ve poked around for a solution on this issue.
There might have been a solution with creating a floppy or using some Dell utilities boot cd, but I’m 300 kilometres from the server so that wasn’t an option.
Here’s some links that helped me in the process.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-extract-an-rpm-package-without-installing-it.html
http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/deb/latest/
http://sysadmin.wikia.com/wiki/PERC_firmware_upgrade_on_debian
Sysadmin.wikia.com’s solution didn’t do the trick for me, there was some script that really wanted rpm on my system (?) . I ended up with something like this:

# apt-get install alien
# rpm2cpio srvadmin-storelib-sysfs-7.0.0-4.1.4.el4.i386.rpm | cpio -idmv
# cp -a ../unpack_rpm/opt/lsi/ /opt/
# vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/lsi_tmp.conf (adding to this file these lines)
/opt/lsi/3rdpartylibs/
/opt/lsi/3rdpartylibs/x86_64
# ./sasdupie -u -s ./payload/

I then got the xml output which told me a reboot was required .