Server RAID/BIOS changes using HP Scripting toolkit and Cobbler

I have to take care about few enclosures with HP ProLiant BL685c and HP ProLiant BL460c blades (both G1). They are quite old now, but still can do a good job. Because there were no operating system I have no idea how the RAID or BIOS is configured. Obviously I want to have it configured the same and I really don't want to go through all of them one by one and configure it manually.

Lucky for me there is a HP Scripting Toolkit (or HP SmartStart Scripting Toolkit) which can boot over PXE and get/set the BIOS/RAID configuration.
It is handy if especially if you have a new servers without OS installed.

Let's see how you can install and configure Cobbler, NFS, PXE, tftpboot and HP Scripting Toolkit to modify the BIOS/RAID information on the server.



Start with installing latest CentOS, getting the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit and basic NFS configuration:


Now install and configure Cobbler:


Once the tftp, NFS, dhcp is ready you can try to "Boot from Network" one of the servers. If the networking is working fine you should at least see getting the IP form DHCP server and the main "blue" menu.

The full video can be seen here:

You can find the examples of files modified by sed in the scripts in GitHub.

Here is the example of the configuration "extracted" from the BL685c blade as shown in the video above.

Enjoy :-)