Issue downgrading 650FLB from SPP 2015.04 to 2014.09

By | July 8, 2015

I have been testing out SPP firmware lately and I wanted to get back to my baseline of 2014.09. I applied the 2014.09 SPP in interactive mode but the flashing of the Emulex CNA failed (the 650FLB). The error code was ‘3’ which didn’t say much. My first troubleshooting step was booted into a RHEL 6 environment and try to apply the firmware manually.

I unpacked the 2014.09 firmware by copying down the specific scexe (Note that this changed to a RPM format later) and running the following:

chmod a+x CPXXXXXXX.scexe

./CPXXXXXXX.scexe –unpack=/var/tmp

When I ran the installer script in /var/tmp the result was the same, it did nothing. It gave me a better clue though. It said it could not find any applicable hardware. After a couple hours of Google-fu, I found a HP Alert that stated that if you try to downgrade from 2015.04 to 2014.09 you may run into the same issue that I was having.

The article linked to an updated download of the 2014.09 firmware as well some instructions for how to run it.

For one thing, the environment you run it from must have libsysfs or sysfsutils rpm installed. The firmware packages needs sysfs in order to discover the nic. Since I was running out of a RHEL 6 environment, I did a “yum info libsysfs” and found that the package was available from the repo. a “yum -y install libsysfs” and I was ready to do the install (./cpxxxxxxx.scexe -s -f)

This issue makes it a little hard for me to auto-downgrade firmware to my current baseline. I use the Scripting Toolkit for Linux as a boot environment, and I’m not sure if it contains the necessary libsysfs packages. I also haven’t tested if having the ‘fixed’ component in the hpsum folder will override the original (I would hope that it would).

Overall this was a painful issue to resolve just to get my hardware back to my baseline. Nic firmware, drivers and virtual connect are super picky so I try to maintain consistency, but issues like this don’t make it easy.

2 thoughts on “Issue downgrading 650FLB from SPP 2015.04 to 2014.09

  1. Deepak

    I tried this but doesn’t works for me. I have sysfsutils installed on my Suse Enterprise Linux 11 64 bit but still I get the below error
    # ./CP023907.scexe -f
    —————————————————
    Loading references…done.
    Performing discovery…
    Preparing the Emulex Kit…done
    ERROR! : No supported hardware was found.

    Reply
    1. Chris Post author

      I’m not sure if the CP023907.scexe was the original firmware, but if it is that won’t do. Once you have sysfsutils installed, you have to refer to the HP article that I referenced and download the special Emulex patch. The package I had from 64-bit linux was CP026211.scexe.

      Then you would do ./CPXXXXX -s -f

      Reply

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