Updating the firmware on Promise arrays is straight forward enough from the WebPAM. But what happens if a firmware update goes funky and you can’t get into the WebPAM any longer (ah, the joys of beta testing)? Well, you can always download an older firmware and reload it provided you can ssh or telnet into the host. Download from http://www.promise.com/support/download.aspx?m=93®ion=en-global for your given model.
Then, you need the firmware accessible to the Promise chassis via tftp. A simple tftp GUI tool is available at http://ww2.unime.it/flr/tftpserver. Once configured, log into the Promise array and then use the ptiflash command to update the firmware. In the following command we’ll use the -s option to identify the IP address of our tftp server and then the -f option to identify the name of the file (note that I’ve shortened the ptif file for this X30 to be just fw.ptif so I don’t fat finger the multiple hyphens in a ridiculously long file name that I can’t autocomplete):
ptiflash -t -s 192.168.69.30 -f fw.ptif
If the server can’t access the file note that you have a tftp client binary that works much like the ftp binary built into OS X to test that you can access the server and the file from the IP address the X30 is using. If the file is accessible, when prompted to update the flash, enter y and press enter.
The update process is going to take about 15 to 20 minutes. If running the latest versions of the X30 firmware I recommend using Firefox.
