PERC3 SCSI RAID firmware upgrade dell poweredge 1650

[Redmond Militante]

hi all

does anyone on the list have any production dell poweredge 1650 servers?

we have several.  we recently got a memo from our dell reps that there is a firmware upgrade to the PERC3 dual channel SCSI raid cards.  this firmware upgrade is supposedly a preventative measure - apparently, dell has had some experience with the cards not being able to recover after one of the raid controllers goes down, they explained to me on the phone that this firmware upgrade is pretty much mandatory.

of course, since our boxen are running freebsd 4.6-4.9-RELENG, the dell rep who came over to our server room to run the firmware upgrade would not touch them.  he left a disk for me to do this myself - apparently, the the firmware upgrade involves booting to a cdrom which applies the firmware for you, rebooting, then hitting control-m to get into the perc3 management console, running a consistency check (could take an hour or so), then rebooting into the o/s.  they informed me that i would not have to upgrade the kernel or download patches for freebsd's native scsi raid drivers for this card.

has anyone applied the firmware upgrade to their own dells?  seems relatively straightforward, but thought i'd check with the list before taking down machines that have been running flawlessly for almost a year to apply something which may be arbitrary...

thanks
redmond


-- 
FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Wed Feb 11 13:58:31 CST 2004
 6:00PM  up 5 days,  3:26, 4 users, load averages: 0.21, 0.18, 0.29
 
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
		-- LaRouchefoucauld
 
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