Hi all,
I just wanted to share an experience with you about my Aspeed BMC firmware upgrade on an Asus P10S-I. I couldn't find much on the topic, so I thought this could serve as a nice tip for others.
tl;dr version: When applying the FWU using a Freedos bootable USB stick, the update takes a long time, and during the initial steps, it looks like the updater has crashed, since no output is seen for a long time. Just be patient and wait, it'll get there.
The reason why I wanted to upgrade was that the current iKVM viewer Java applet wouldn't run on JAVA 8 update 131 or later, due to the MD5 signature of the applet no longer being supported. It is possible to circumvent this, however I think it would break every time I updatede Java on my windows machine. I was unhappy that Asus didn't release an update this issue. However, they actually did, but only if you visit their ASMB8-IKVM support site.
I downloaded the update, and initially I though I could use the web-based firmware upgrade, but it did not work, worse yet, the BMC did not recover from the upgrade before I rebooted the whole system.
So next step was to:
I just wanted to share an experience with you about my Aspeed BMC firmware upgrade on an Asus P10S-I. I couldn't find much on the topic, so I thought this could serve as a nice tip for others.
tl;dr version: When applying the FWU using a Freedos bootable USB stick, the update takes a long time, and during the initial steps, it looks like the updater has crashed, since no output is seen for a long time. Just be patient and wait, it'll get there.
The reason why I wanted to upgrade was that the current iKVM viewer Java applet wouldn't run on JAVA 8 update 131 or later, due to the MD5 signature of the applet no longer being supported. It is possible to circumvent this, however I think it would break every time I updatede Java on my windows machine. I was unhappy that Asus didn't release an update this issue. However, they actually did, but only if you visit their ASMB8-IKVM support site.
I downloaded the update, and initially I though I could use the web-based firmware upgrade, but it did not work, worse yet, the BMC did not recover from the upgrade before I rebooted the whole system.
So next step was to:
- Create a bootable USB, using Rufus
- Move the contents of the update zip file to root of the usb stick
- Boot up on the stick
- Execute flash2.bat, press Y to start the upgrade.
- The update takes a long time, and during the initial steps, it looks like the updater has crashed, since no output is seen for a long time. Just be patient and wait, it'll get there. I think I waited 5 - 10 minutes before any output was shown. I guess it took about 25 mins, but I did not time it.
- The update seem to wipe any configuration, so make sure to set up management LAN NIC, admin password etc. afterwards.