Hi, Let me explain a bit our situation. I work at a non-profit organization called Bednet, in Belgium. We provide children with a long-term illness the opportunity to follow classes live from their home or hospital. For this, we provide all the hardware and software, such as computers and Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera's. We provide this service for free.
All the computers are Dell. The types are OptiPlex 790 and 990. We run Debian Jessie as OS. Recently a problem has arisen: the USB3 PCI expansion card (required for our camera's) crashes regularly, making the video image freeze and requiring a reboot. Very annoying of course. But there's a solution: updating to the latest BIOS version. Unfortunately, all these computers are remote and spread out over the country. So we need some kind of way to do it from within Debian. All of our computers are connected over VPN and are configured with Puppet, so given the right tool we can automate this without a problem. There is a dellBiosUpdate executable which comes with libsmbios. The problem is I can't obtain the header files for the BIOS updates (for instance, 'O990-A19.exe' for the OptiPlex 990). I've tried all different kind of ways to extract them from the DOS executables: - In FreeDOS, using the -writehdrfile / -writeromfile / -writehexfile switch, the options are not recognized - Also the '/s /e=C:' switch is not recognized - I can't open the executable using 7zip or something similar to obtain what's inside - I was able to find and extract what I believe is the header file (it was a zlib compressed file) using binwalk and also with this tool: https://github.com/theopolis/uefi-firmware-parser/blob/master/scripts/contrib/dell_extract_hdr.py; unfortunately, the dellBiosUpdate executable reports: 'libsmbios_c.rbu_hdr.InvalidRbuHdr: Not a valid RBU HDR File. Header doesnt have '$RBU' header.' There is also a (old) mirror repo that I found with header files: http://ftp.centrale-marseille.fr/pub/dell/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs/ But the header files for the OptiPlex 990 are not there (system ID: 0x047E). Is there any way anyone could help me out? I would be so grateful as it would be a tremendous help for us. Best regards, Simon Wydooghe
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