hello all,

 

I bought a dell poweredge c2100 for my second Unraid build. I've built many PCs but this is my first actual commercial server - the other Unraid build was a Supermicro board in a Norco 4224. 

 

This server is 2u and it is very, very loud. It appears the fans run at 100%, all the time, which is like 5k rpm. They are not in a particularly warm room. With the Norco, I removed the 80mm screamers and replaced them with a 120mm fan plate and some nice quiet Noctuas, but this doesn't seem like a viable option here - changing to different fans would seem to cause lots of fan alerts, according to Google. 

 

What google said was that BMC firmware of 1.7.0 and below didn't have this problem, the fans idled at around 3k rpms. I'd like to downgrade as I am at 1.82.

 

Here is where I am running into trouble: I don't know what I am doing. 

 

I enabled dedicated NIC for BMC and plugged in a cable. I set an IP in the bios, then logged into BMC, changed to a secure password. I am not clear exactly what to do now. When I go into the "firmware update" section of BMC, which seems very straightforward, I see an option to upload a new firmware.  I tried getting the appropriate firmware from here: https://www.dell.com/support/home/ae/en/aebsdt1/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=hh9ww   but... the files I see on here don't seem to actually contain the correct bin I need to upload, and the instructions included with the files are... very not clear to me.

 

What is the easiest way to do this? 

 

Thanks!

 

Edited June 26, 20197 yr by Ouze
solved issue

OK, I figured it out. Turns out there was nothing wrong with my process, I just wasn't waiting long enough. After the bin file is uploaded, it just sits there for about 8 minutes, but it did indeed then finally update and I have my issue fixed. 3500RPM fans now, much better!

Can you tell me what bin file you ended up using exactly?  I have downloaded over 10 BMC Update files all from the Dell sites, and the only response I get from the unit is "Check failed 0x84"

On 6/26/2019 at 5:54 PM, Ouze said:

OK, I figured it out. Turns out there was nothing wrong with my process, I just wasn't waiting long enough. After the bin file is uploaded, it just sits there for about 8 minutes, but it did indeed then finally update and I have my issue fixed. 3500RPM fans now, much better!

Ouze, any chance you can send me the file you used to downgrade BMC to 1.66?  I still can't find a functional file.

Here's the firmware image that I just used to downgrade to 1.70 to solve the fan noise issue in my C2100:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/ae/en/aebsdt1/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=hh9ww

 

I downloaded PEC2100Bmc170.zip and then uploaded the enclosed firm.bin file via the BMC web interface. Note - I had to choose "Forced" for upgrade type instead of Normal because otherwise it kept throwing the same checksum error as mentioned above (0x84). Assuming this was just because the firmware version was less than what was currently installed.

 

After updating for about 10 minutes, system rebooted and the fans gradually stepped down from 5,000+ rpm to 3,000 rpm and it's finally tolerable to be in the same room with it!

Ugh really sorry I didn't see this until now. I'm glad someone else showed up with that. The file he linked is what I used. 

Edited November 5, 20196 yr by Ouze

Thank you for help!