Is BIOS firmware-flashing routine for you guys? Is it easy or
error-prone. Are there any such "paperweight servers" lurking in your
racks and server-rooms? Or is this a bugaboo of the ancient dark-ages?
I don't believe I've ever bricked a server, though I don't flash any more
than I have too. my experience is that even interrupted bios flashes
seem to be re-flashable. I'm guessing that they isolate the main bios
from the code that performs the flash (which perhaps they never update).
my organization has > 2500 nodes and most have been flashed a time or two;
I think we've had a couple failed flashes that worked on second try.
we might have actually bricked a machine or two over 4 years: call it
2 bricks in 5k flashes...
(all this flashing is of non-UPS nodes, done with PXE-booted floppy images.)
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
