I have an old dell T710 that i use for development and testing purposes…. although the old girl is quite the workhorse the noise from the fans have been causing me much annoyance.

I followed a number of Internet guides and tried to change the default Dell fans to the Arctic F9 ones – although I was able to make four custom Arctic F9 fans fit into the Dell fan brackets that worked there was an insurmountable problem. The Arctic F9 fans ran at a much lower spin rate than the Dell ones so the system kept spinning them up and slowing them down, it sounded like some young kid revving up their car engine at the traffic lights.

I ended up having to upgrade the firmware after replacing the fans; I went to the DELL website to download the “Development Toolkit” http://www.dell.com/support/article/hk/en/hkdhs1/sln296511/updating-dell-poweredge-servers-via-bootable-media-iso?lang=en

I tried to follow this guy’s guide; whoever he is – he is obviously a genius….

http://blog.stuffbymatt.ca/Firmware/dell_idrac6_pt1.html

http://blog.stuffbymatt.ca/Firmware/dell_idrac6_pt2.html

I printed off a PDF version of his work just in case his site goes off-line. The works of genius do need to be preserved. Reverse Engineering Dell iDRAC6 Express_ Fan Control – Stuff By Matt

I managed to edit the hexcode but after looking at the logs I found that the hash change was not being recognised.

The upgrade of everything was ok except the ESM software which stupidly required i386 architecture when everything else used X86_64; I really don’t know why Dell is so retarded that they have everything in X86_64 and then the ESM software in i386. I ended up having to burn a Centos 6.5 i386 disc – boot into it – run ESM upgrade – which then allowed me to upgrade the ESM but I almost gave up because it was such a hassle.

I attach below the ESM files that I used – the 2.90 is the version you want to use.ESM_Firmware_9GJYW_LN32_2.90_A00.BIN; I also downloaded a few other versions that I didn’t end up using – I will upload here in case you need them. ESM_Firmware_C1GG0_LN32_3.50_A00.BIN and ESM_Firmware_3VM7N_LN32_1.85_A00.BIN.

After installing ESM to 2.90 the fans suddenly became quiet I didn’t bother trying to resolve the hashkey issue. The Arctic F9 fans on my Dell T710 are so quiet now I can’t even hear them and the temperature in iDrac is measuring around 29 degress celsius after 24 hours of uptime.