It was scary to upgrade some firmware when there were no one to help you on board at DC on a weekend and you are sitting in a remote location connected via broadband facing technical glitches. Firmware upgrades failed yesterday as I had directly started upgrading the RAID Controller firmware upgrades. I did learn that I have to finish few other upgrades like BIOS, Baseboard Management Controller, Dell Remote Access Controller 4/I were supposed to be upgraded before setting off with PERC upgrades meant for raid controllers. When ever a firmware upgrades fails you should not forget to remove the temporary files else it will bring you nightmares.
When I started off with the firmware upgrades today, I started getting these lines turning up on console. This is a my first Firmware upgrade on Dell PowerEdge series servers on Linux.
An Update Package is already running.
Wait until it is complete before proceeding with another update.
I had to remove a lock file which was left on the server due to yesterdays test run : /var/lock/.spsetup
It all started when I started facing load issues on one of my Mysql Server and found that “iowait” was too high to cope up with the high traffic at peak hours. 
I had to contact Dell to check out if there is any fix which they can provide in order to resolve this issue as there was no software related changes made to the server. You can also find that iowait is a very common issue on Linux servers and many times its directly related to the hardware and the OS installed.
We use this server to provide database solutions to Soho launch installations which we have for various websites. It was funny to find various stats generation queries coming to Mysql server and hanging over there for quite a long time that too around peak hours and causing slow response issues from servers. When I contacted Joe Lain of Soholaunch asking for a solution to the issue which I have been facing with my server, he too found it funny to see SQL queries. He was found to be working on a significant server slow down issue which was already traced back to the same SQL queries which I had pointed out. Waiting for an update from him to get this thing resolved at the earliest.
Anyways, I’m done with the firmware upgrades as I had promised. Yes issue is still not fixed. Now, I got to monitor the load on the server at peak hours and wait for update from Soho Launch to get the issue resolved completely. Wish me luck 
I shall update you once I’m through with it.
