After fumbling around for a while trying to mount an ISO on my Supermicro motherboard IPMI, I finally figured out that it requires SMB1 in order to mount.

SMB1 is an old and potentially insecure protocol but if you wish to enable it here are the steps.

• Navigate to Services and click on properties for the SMB service. …

In an effort to increase the performance of a generic 4 port PCI-E USB 3.0 adapter I bought on eBay, I went down the rabbit hole of flashing newer firmware on it.

After several failed attempts at using the VIA flash utility (see links below), I realized I had to determine which SPI flash was on my card. In my case it …

If you have a Dell H200, IBM M1015 or other rebranded LSI 9211-8i HBA, you may run into an issue flashing IT firmware due to the error message "Cannot Flash IT Firmware over IR Firmware".

An example of such an error:

 1fs0:\> sas2flash.efi -c 0 -o -f 2118it_19.bin …

Now that the Dell R210 II is unsupported, obtaining firmware is tougher. I was able to generate a bootable ISO using Dell Repository Manager (DRM) which contains the latest firmware updates as of December 2019. I am publishing it here hoping it is useful for somebody.

This worked for my system but your mileage my vary …

I was unable to get esxcli, storcli or MegaCLI to display my 9211-8i (IR mode) adapter information in ESXi:

 1[root@hostname:~] esxcli storage core adapter list | grep mpt
 2vmhba2    mpt2sas    link-n/a    sas.xx     (0000:02:00.0) LSI Logic / Symbios Logic Dell 6Gbps SAS HBA Adapter
 3
 4[root@hostname:~] …