UEFI BIOS inspector support

[cstoneba]

If you have servers that use UEFI BIOS, the Linux BES Client (as of 9.5.4.38) is not able to query smbios/dmi info. Feel free to vote on the RFE I just created for this to get this included in a future release. Thanks

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=99435

[jgstew]

So are you saying it used to work with UEFI but now it does not, or it never worked with UEFI?

[cstoneba]

Not sure. This is the first time we have servers running UEFI.

[JonL]

Even on Windows, the SMBIOS query responses have changed on 9.5.4. I had to alter some long-standing relevance (worked for years), to get the same responses.

For example:
q: (value “uuid” of structure “system_information” of smbios)
E: The expression could not be evaluated: class UnrepresentableBinaryString

If I downgrade the agent to say 9.2.x, the same query works fine on the same computer.

[AlanM]

This is because on prior releases we didn’t have to know the encoding of strings but in a UNICODE release we need to know the encoding of every item. The binary string could easily be cast to a string if it actually is one with

(value "uuid" of structure "system_information" of smbios) as string

and if not you can make it a hex value

(value "uuid" of structure "system_information" of smbios) as hexadecimal

[JonL]

Interesting … I didn’t realize that unicode would effect this. In my old relevance, I was casting as a string. That still no longer works, however casting as hexadecimal does work.

q: (value “uuid” of structure “system_information” of smbios) as string
E: The expression could not be evaluated: class UnrepresentableBinaryString

q: (value “uuid” of structure “system_information” of smbios) as hexadecimal
A: 4214ad026c0e3a7722a8a38262e61333

Good to know. Wonder what other unicode surprise await …

[AlanM]

There were only a few but basically if you didn’t know the encoding then we may have had to change behaviour. Not much in all the changes to be honest but there are a few there.

[cstoneba]

An example from the 9.5.4 Oracle Linux client on UEFI:

Q: exists smbios
E: dmi inspector error creating dmi.info ([dmi info not found])
T: 2817

[AlanM]

It seems different vendors create different problems. The Microsoft Surface 3 which uses a UEFI BIOS works fine with the inspectors on a Windows client so possibly we have issues to check on the UNIX implementation. I’ve seen PMR’s and RFE’s for this now so we are aware of this.

[cstoneba]

I submitted a RFE last year (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=99435) to get the Client to have UEFI support but haven’t heard anything. As we have more servers deployed that use UEFI (specifically, HP Apollos), the BES client can’t retrieve information via dmi from them and it’s causing issues.

Anyone hear of any movement on this?
thanks

[cstoneba]

I take it UEFI is still not supported, correct?
it looks like the old RFE didn’t move over to HCL so I’ve created a new one: UEFI BIOS inspector support