SuperMicro X11SSW-F - How to factory reset = Sorted.....

[penrhos]

Work are throwing out a couple of 1U 4-bay appliances and I might be able to get them for free....

They're rebadged SuperMicro 1U severs with X11SSW-F m/b with the 3x PCIe 8x risers installed.

One slot has a LSI SAS controller in the other has a 4-port 1Gb nic, they have 16Gb of DDR4-ECC ram installed.

Problem number 1.

They're bios locked with a password, secure boot is enabled and the ipmi has been disabled so at moment they'll only boot the appliance operating system from the installed disks - swapping disks or trying to get it to boot from USB doesn't work. Also has a custom splash screen so may be a custom version of the bios.

Problem number 2.

Can anyone confirm if the M.2 slot can use a standard laptop M.2 SSD as the primary boot drive as I have a 64Gb 2260 one going spare.

Reading the motherboard manual it looks like my best option is to force it into "Bios recovery mode" and flash it with the latest bios - clearing NVRAM when doing so. Then if that works re-flash the IPMI with latest BMC firmware with preserve = n to factory reset the ipmi.

Anyone tried this to "unlock" an appliance and convert it back to stock?

If I can revert it to "Stock" the plan is to install a 10Gbe card in place to the 4 * 1Gb, flash the lsi card into IT-mode and re-use the 4*4Tb sata drives in zfs with TrueNas.

 

[penrhos]

OK - after much faffing around I've solved problem number 1.

Using clear cmos or removing the battery didn't clear the password.

Setting jumper JBR1 to pins 2-3 and powering on the server drops it into "Bios recovery" mode without it asking for any passwords.

I copied the latest bios file to a 1Gb USB pen and renamed it to super.bin and plugged the usb pen into the onboard usb port.

Powered the server up and followed the menu instructions for recovering the bios - including resetting NVRAM.

Once done - powered it off - reset JBR1 back to pins 1-2 and removed the usb pen..

Powered on the server and pressed "Del" to enter bios - F3 to reset it to optimised defaults, set date etc and boot order to usb first.

The BMC/IPMI still wasn't working so I copied the latest BMC firmware onto a dos bootable usb pen and booted the server from it.

ran ADUpdate.exe -f ipmi.bin -r n to flash the BMC and reset to factory defaults.

Power cycled the server and it's up and running - no passwords, I can enter bios without a password and set it to boot from the M.2 slot so the 4 SATA drives can be used for ZFS. and the IPMI gui works with the default login of ADMIN/ADMIN.

The M.2 works fine with an old Samsung M.2 SSD I had lying around so Number 2 is solved as well....

You can't beat a free 4-drive hot-swap 1U server for a couple of hours googling, a few reboots using a couple of old USB pens.

 

[james23]

hi, any chance you could update with what the powerdraw of this board is? thanks