[plug] SSD Firmware update

[Brad Campbell]

I have a couple of machines with Crucial T500 NVME drives in them. A casual check this morning indicated I'd forgotten to update the firmware on one of them when I installed it a year or so ago and it was 2 versions behind.
No major issues, just one of those "Oh, I missed that" sort of things with the newer versions fixing some bugs I was unlikely to run into given my use pattern.

Crucial are one of those sane organisations that supply firmware updates as a USB bootable ISO image rather than requiring some obscene bit of Windows malware to do the job.
The machine in question is the house/office server. It runs a pile of stuff and it's one of those "I don't reboot it unless I really need to" sort of boxes.

I downloaded the firmware zip file, unzipped it and was about to dd it to a USB stick "for later" when it occurred to me to have a look at the contents.
A loopback mount showed it was a basic EFI / Grub hybrid both of which loopback loaded a file called corepure.gz. Having a look into that showed it was a gzipped cpio archive of a small Linux setup.

Neato, let's extract that and have a look. A bit of poking showed along with some very clever "failsafe" scripting, the firmware was in /opt/firmware and the executable was /sbin/msecli.
A bit of examination and experimentation and I had the new firmware loaded, reset the drive with an "nvme reset /dev/nvme0" and all good without having to reboot.

Thanks Crucial! On the other hand, I'd be more than happy to cast Samsung into the Pit of Despair for their windows crapware.