[plug] A permanent USB drive inside your server

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

Equipped with an APC managed PDU, and an IBM IP KVM, I no longer have to 
physically access my server(s) to maintain them.

I recently left a USB stick which has a dos and a linux partition 
plugged into one of the machines and by accident found it is a most 
excellent way of remotely upgrading firmware that must be done from 
outside of a running machine.

I wanted to upgrade the Mainboard BIOS, and the firmware on both SAS 
cards. The LSI MegaCLI is supposed to allow you to upgrade firmware from 
inside the system, but due to strange oddities and the fact it's just a 
crap application, to get both cards to update without removing them from 
the machine and doing one at a time, I need to do it from dos.

Having the USB stick there already, I simply downloaded the apps and 
firmware, rebooted the machine into the BIOS to run the built in 
update-app, and then booted to dos to upgrade the LSI cards.

Next reboot and I was back into Linux.

I'm now looking for someone who sells USB drives with the 4 pin molex 
header on them so I can just plug one into the internal USB sockets on 
each motherboard. Failing that it's soldering iron time.

It's probably obvious to everyone else, but I thought it was cool enough 
to warrant sharing.