I ran into a problem today with the update process of an iDRAC card, and Google was very little help.  I began the firmware update process, and my connection conked out during the upload.  When I returned the page, I was greeted with “Firmware update in progress”.

I decided to head off to the comic book store, and I came back to the same thing an hour later.   I installed the command-line tools via a wonderful post on “M D3VELOPMENT” blog, and tried to soft-reset the iDRAC card.  It was equally as grumpy:

[root@server ~]# idracadm racreset soft
ERROR: A firmware update is currently in progress. Unable to reset the
RAC at this time.


Google was no help. I don’t have a ton of experience with IPMI cards, so I was kind of at a loss.  Then I discovered ipmitool.  It turns out, after installing ipmitool (which is helpfully available in the dell repositories that were added earlier!), it was a simple matter of forcing the iDRAC card to restart with:

ipmitool mc reset cold

I waited a couple minutes, and sure enough, I was able to update the firmware!