HP Business Notebook and Desktop PC F10 setup overview Technical White Paper Technical white paper

Appendix C: Creating an in-house repository to support BIOS updates

Introduction

HP notebooks, desktops, or workstations can receive BIOS updates over a network from a repository on a pre-defined HP

HTTP /FTP site. Alternatively, the BIOS Update via Network option also supports updates from an in-house server.

This appendix describes how to configure a repository on an in-house HTTP/ FTP server

in order to store approved BIOS files

for HP platforms.

Terminology

HTTP server – Uses HTTP protocol to interact with clients such as web browsers; common implementations include

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Apache.

FTP server – Uses FTP protocol to interact with FTP client such as web browsers, as well as applications such as WS-

FTP and FileZilla; common implementations include Microsoft IIS and Apache.

SysID – System ID: four hexadecimal characters that uniquely identify a particular HP platform. This is reported

through the SMBIOS.

BIOS Update via Network – HP feature designed to allow manual or automatic BIOS updates to be performed

directly through cloud delivery.

Finding a particular BIOS file

The HP repository (an HTTP/FTP file store) has a different folder for each SysID, each containing the following:

• A catalog (.xml file) that lists supported BIOS files for the particular platform

• Individual BIOS updates (.bin files)

Note: A custom implementation of an HTTP or FTP server requires a catalog and one or more BIOS files. Even if you are only

providing a single BIOS update, a catalog file is required.

When using the BIOS Update via Network feature, the BIOS computes the address of the custom repository using a base

address (update_url).The format of the repository address becomes:

update_url/sysid/sysid.xml

For example, if the repository address is http://example.com/files/pcbios

and the SysID is 1909, the BIOS would attempt to

download the catalog from http://example.com/files/pcbios/1909/1909.xml.

The domain portion of the URL is not case-sensitive; thus http://example.com and HTTP://EXAMPLE.COM are treated as the

same.

The path portion of the URL is generally case-sensitive on UNIX or Linux platforms. Conversely, the path is generally not case-

sensitive on Windows platforms. These statements are true regardless of the web server deployed. For example, if running

Apache on Linux, http://example.com/bios and http://example.com/BIOS

are generally not treated as being the same. If

running IIS on Windows, http://example.com/bios and http://example.com/BIOS are generally treated as the same. Any case-

sensitivity is determined by the HTTP or FTP server, not by the HP system running the BIOS Update via Network feature.

Organizing the catalog

The BIOS builds download URLs for the catalog and the update file using the same mechanism, ensuring that the update is

downloaded from the appropriate repository folder.

Note: In order to prevent buffer overflow attacks during the download process, the BIOS sets a hard-coded limit of 100 KB

before downloading the catalog. Thus, custom catalog files should never be allowed to grow larger than 100 KB in size.

Catalog file schema

The schema shown in Figure B-1 is common to HP and customer repositories.

Setting up the server is beyond the scope of this appendix.