what spacewalk doesn't do

A month ago I installed spacewalk to use instead of mrepo. That way we should be able to manage our rpm repositories much easier. It works nicely, we now have a good overview of what machines are behind in their updates and what the updates are. patching them is just a few clicks. it saves time.
But it also doesn't do a few things I thought it would:
- no ability to select specific packages. so the yum.repo.d include and exclude commands are not supported
- no ability to 'progress' packages from one repo to another. so if our centos-updates repository is updated every night and we use it to update our DTAP street, then we run the risk of deploying newer packages to P than we did to D because the repo is by then newer. So we need to sync by hand instead.

Dell lifecycle controller

Dell has this great feature in their modern servers, the Unified Server Configurator (what's in a name), USC. Or it's the Lifecycle controller.. never know which is which. You can get to it through the bios and it allows you to update the system firmware. That's a neat trick, because it saves you from needing to install any OS dependent packages. Especially on linux that can be a lifesave because Dell only supports RedHat and Suse. They make life intentionally hard for CentOS users by trying to put as many 'redhat' checks in their code, previously only on /etc/redhadt-release but recently also on /etc/issue. So those need to be modified on CentOS systems in order for Dell linux firmware updates to work. Not so with the lifecycle controller.
Just press F10 to enter the 'sytem services' (another name for the USC?) in the bios screen, and select 'usc settings','network settings' to set up the network connection. Then through 'platform update', 'launch platform update', 'ftp server' you end up at a screen where you can configure the ftp server (ftp.dell.com or ftp.euro.dell.com [why don't they use geo-dns?]). And then you can 'test network connection' or just press next.

That's where the fun stopped for me. This server, an r510, has nic1 connected to the san and a pci intel 10gig nic going to the routable network and internet. The update apparantly is only possible over NIC1, even though you are able to configure the USC for a different nic. Such a bummer..

I tried this instead, but that only works for the BIOS. It put me on the right track though. I needed to update the H700 perc controller, so I ended up doing this:
./sasdupie -u -s /usr/share/firmware/dell/dup/pci_firmware_ven_0x1000_dev_0x0079_subven_0x1028_subdev_0x1f17_version_a10/ -o doit.txt
and in the doit.txt it said 'The operation was successful. '
`omreport storage controller` confirmed it:
Firmware Version                              : 12.10.2-0004

done.