Automatically Check if BIOS Version is Latest

[Trent00]

Hi, Is there a way to get the latest  Release BIOS Version of an HP Computer, any model, automatilcy? I want to find either a program to run or make a script that can be set to perodicly check for new BIOS version without having to go to the support website. 

For Example on this t520 the BIOS Version is listed on the hp support drivers page.Is there a way  I can lookup a page that can be easily read by a script to check the latest version?

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-t520-flexible-thin-client/6875920

Any other ideas on doing this would be welcomed. The Idea is to get an alert when the BIOS is out of date within 30 days.

[mdklassen]

Why would you want to update the BIOS?

One reason is to support a (newer, faster) replacement CPU, in the extremely rare case where that is required.

I am firmly in the camp that "if it works, leave it alone".

Also, a failure of the AC power during a BIOS-update can "brick" the motherboard.

So, unless a PC is connected to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), I don't try.

I've seen postings on this forum from people who have updated, with less-than-perfect outcomes, who then find out that the BIOS is preventing a previous BIOS from being installed to "roll-back".  They express their complete frustration.

[mdklassen]

> Is there a way I can lookup a page that can be easily read by a script to check the latest version?

Yes.

How much command-line experience do you have, with UNIX tools like 'wget' (to fetch a web-page, and save the HTML into a file), and 'grep' (to search the contents of a file for a specific string) and 'expect' (to simulate a mouse-click at a certain (X,Y) position) ?

Are you familiar with the new PowerShell programming-language in Windows?

[Trent00]

Hi mdklassen,

I dont have much experience in the unix area but am familure with some PowerShell and a little more in VBscript. At this point I am only focusing on detecting if there is an update. DOwnloading the automaticly might be something To work on later down the road. 

As of now I have created a VBScript to get the website linked above and store the enitre html content in a string. Then I parse the string and find text between two specific start and end points. The problem I am struggling with is if you look at the source of the webpage its a mess with no unique html tags to around where the BIOS Version (plus a few code problems i'll make a new post for).

I am hopeing someone would know of a diffrent link that could get me a cleaner html to find the latest BIOS Version of the specified model, which may change to any other model. I can manualy add the links for each model we do.  I know HP has a public ftp site for their downloads but only contains file names, no way to know what BIOS version or modle pc they corespond to.

[Trent00]

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@mdklassen wrote:

Why would you want to update the BIOS?

One reason is to support a (newer, faster) replacement CPU, in the extremely rare case where that is required.

I am firmly in the camp that "if it works, leave it alone".

Also, a failure of the AC power during a BIOS-update can "brick" the motherboard.

So, unless a PC is connected to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), I don't try.

I've seen postings on this forum from people who have updated, with less-than-perfect outcomes, who then find out that the BIOS is preventing a previous BIOS from being installed to "roll-back".  They express their complete frustration.

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Thanks for your input and I am aware of the dangers of doing this. I have updated literaly hunderds of hp computer BIOS's and have had a very high success rate. The ones that fail ,even if power goes out, I have still been able to recover. For what they fix I recomend at reading through HP's release notes. You'll find some security patches along with fixes that I have seen actualy fix problems end users have been having. I completly understand your reasoning though to leave it alone if it works.