Upgrading DELL firmware

          One of the few maintenance tasks often neglected by system administrators, is that of upgrading server firmware. Whether that be BIOS, Network cards, RAID or any other firmware, these subsystems might never see an update during the life time of a server.

Luckily, Dell makes this very easy under Red Hat / Centos. Here are the steps:

# wget -q -O – http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi | bash
# yum -y install firmware-tools.noarch
# yum -y install $(bootstrap_firmware)
# update_firmware --yes
# reboot

You might need to apply the last three steps a few times between reboots, as not all firmware is applied in the same go.

Also, you need to reboot your machine. No cold boot, shutdown, power off etc, just a nice warm reboot. :)