100 Days - Day 2 - BIOS Failures
After some easy wins on Day 1 with things I had already done before, I wanted to move onto updating the BIOS on my new Supermicro Motherboard. My motherboard shipped with an Intel E5-2630 V3 CPU, but I was planning on using my E5-2680 V4 CPU in the system. A BIOS update would likely improve the stability of this change out.
Like the IPMI Firmware, it was ancient. I really want to know if an enterprise was actually running this thing in production like this. It was on some 1.x version of the BIOS and Supermicro's page suggested the latest version was 3.4. I read through the release notes and saw there were a ton of patched CVEs. The document itself only went back to the first 3.0 release, so I couldn't imagine all the other things fixed in the 1.x and 2.x major versions.
New Method Attempt 1 - IPMI UI
I tried updating through the IPMI Web UI, but it requires a per node License. Boooo.
New Method Attempt 2 - FreeDOS
I seemed to recall having to install Windows on a disk before and then use the batch scripts from there, but I was curious if I could save some time and came across FreeDOS. The project describes itself with “FreeDOS is a complete, free, DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems.” I managed to download something and get it running in a VM within minutes, so felt confident it would work on a USB drive as I'm accustomed to with Linux, but it seemed far from that.
I lost several hours trying to get it running or even pushed to my USB drive. The official docs were all using descriptions of the last version, so that didn't give me confidence, and the internet was pointing me to very old sources on how to use it. This Superuser post sounded complicated and involved so I went looking elsewhere. There was a Facebook post from 2014. I tried a few things like using dd or Balena Etcher but it wouldn't boot. I tried loading up my Windows Dual boot I seldomly touch and use Rufus. The UI and docs for Rufus and FreeDOS seemed lacking as well. In the end, I gave up. I do want to return back to it at some point to give them a fair shake.