100 Days - Day 3 - BIOS Wins
New Method Attempt 3 - Windows Server
After failing with FreeDOS, I wanted to get my BIOS update over with as securely and quickly as possible. I decided to do what my intuition told me to do in the first place. I installed Windows Server 2016 on it in a matter of minutes and copied the file over from another machine on my LAN. I tried running the batch scripts annnnnddd they didn't work either. They quickly failed and alerted me they needed to run in 16-bit compatibility mode. That didn't inspire confidence since a BIOS update can brick a machine, so I dumped that method as well.
New Method Attempt 4 - SUM
Supermicro has a newer tool called SUM that sounds good on paper, feels very DevOps centered, and I wanted to try it. But it costs $28 per managed node. Nope from me as well.
New Method Attempt 5 - Super Doctor 5
I was about to render myself to going back to one of the previous methods, but decided to look a little more. Finally I found Super Doctor 5. It's yet another tool from Supermicro (can they just pick one and stick with it please?) Luckily it is free if you run it on each node. If you want to manage multiple nodes from a single node, then you'll need to buy licenses there as well. Luckily I had already installed Windows, so it was just a matter of downloading it, verifying SHASUMs, and getting off to the races.
Everything seemed to be working just fine until towards the end of the BIOS upload progress I got the error saying something about ‘ME client modes.’ I searched around the internet a bit and it seemed more dire than it was. I got up the courage to do a reboot, and tada, the IPMI registered that BIOS was fine. It got into the Windows OS just fine, and I was able to verify similar functionality there in Super Doctor 5. So who knows what that was about.