Ball Dawg!

So you’ve had to replace a main board in your IBM blade, we’ve all been there.  Generally, should you have asked for your friendly neighborhood tech to come out, he will kindly update your fresh motherboard with the original machines serial number and machine type/model number.  If you’ve ever watched him do his work, you know on earlier blades he used the BIOs update utility from IBMs website to update that information.  Well times have changed, this is no longer an option on UEFI and IMM based blades.   Before you go and call IBM, you can use IBM’s ASU utility to update them.   When I called they actually sent me an in house bootable ISO, which ended up just booting Linux and running a shell script that ran the following two commands:

./asu64 set SYSTEM_PROD_DATA.SysInfoSerialNum serial_number
./asu64 set SYSTEM_PROD_DATA.SysInfoProdName type_model

Now obviously you’ll be replacing serial_number and type_model with what you want to update the machine too, so don’t just run those commands outright.

Another note of interest was that the machine originally did not have the latest UEFI or IMM firmware on them – and the update would not take – so update everything before attempting this.

For those interested you can also run a ‘show’ on the above information to get the serial and model – I mention this because it does not look like dmidecode works for reading that information any longer.