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.

RAID disk check in Linux

One day I checked dmesg from one of my servers and I saw I/O errors :-(

gate:~ dmesg
...
[ 4220.798665] ide: failed opcode was: unknown                                                    
[ 4220.798665] end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 21067462                                   
[ 4222.983683] hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[ 4222.983683] hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=21067572, sector=21067470
...

Lucky for me there are two disks in RAID 1 so my data was not lost. The machine is "just" firewall, so I decided to play little bit with the bad hard disk, because there are no important data on it. Usually if you see errors like I mentioned above you replace disk without any questions, but I would like to "get" some outputs from diagnostic commands. So you can see what you can do in such case.