Xs 1,1-3,1 time for a sticky: Xserve upgrade guide

[osxster]

Would someone be willing to put together a how to guide on building and flashing the firmware into the 2009 Xserve? I read this thread but I really wouldn’t know where to get started. I’m assuming this can be done without a JTAG and be done with some software flashing utility? I’m not too concerned about the I guess blue CPU lights as they never worked for me anyway. I am guessing it probably has something to do with the EFI emulator I have installed for Mojave as the lights go out with the EFI firmware loads.

Lastly will this fix the Fan problem with installing W5590 CPU’s? When I install mine, the fans start off slow but eventually go to full blast even though the CPU temperature is cooler than my previous Xeon’s. This server is just way too loud with those and I had to remove them. Will the fans work properly with any of the Hex Core CPUs which works on the MacPros?

Osxster

 

[nos1609]

Some updates on my XServe3,1 Pro conversion
I have successfully flashed the *.FDs from the lastest High Sierra and Mojave builds, and I am surprised that it boots up relatively faster now compared to the stock XServe3,1 B06 bootrom. I have managed to get back my original serial number inserted in the firmware (I'm not going to disclose it since it is an in-house Apple software), and memory limitations is not a technical issue at all, just a cosmetic one. My current config is a basic 2.26 single cpu model with 24 gigs of ram, and even with SystemProfiler clearly stating that there are only 16 available, the real workload usage by memtest was nearly close to 23 gigs once the test itself was running.
So far this is a great result for me since the "lucid" members of the community are boycotting the Xserve subject like an epidemic desease. I personally don't care much about all this kindergarten stuff, really we are all persons, we all have to feel something, but this place is a community, not an isolated underground criminal unit so you have to keep your mouth shut under the threat of life. (end of lyric off topic)
Now back to serious things. I would not discover that the clear FW dump provided by Apple with no board identification data inside nor NVRAM config stored inside gonna work out of box without panics or else If only I could flash anything at all using more "tender" methods like people briefly shared here. I mean the corrected CRC32 efiupdater file so It neglect the different mac pro firmware protection checksum. I barely haven't been able to flash anything using the bless command or stock apple firmware update utilities for xserve. I have a guess that the drive modules or the non-raid card is here the ones to blame since I saw exactly same error code patterns trying to update the firmware with an NVMe coupled to a sintech adapter in a MacBook Air. Meaning that without an Apple HDD you basically can't update the firmware by any means. Excluding Dosdude1 tool wich worked great when my cheap test clip failed. I have a friend good ad soldering and logic board repair, so I am not afraid of getting a "bricked" mobo in one of the two xserves I own, but at the moment my actions taken to get the xserve running nvme, 6 cores and thunderbolt are looking similar to a monkey giggling with a grenade rather to a technical approach. So I need some testers with a soic clip being ready to literally burn their logic board to achieve Mac Pro's modularity in a rack unit form. Hope for your support and knowledge sharing.
And sorry for such a long "essay"

 

[edgerider]

Some updates on my XServe3,1 Pro conversion
I have successfully flashed the *.FDs from the lastest High Sierra and Mojave builds, and I am surprised that it boots up relatively faster now compared to the stock XServe3,1 B06 bootrom. I have managed to get back my original serial number inserted in the firmware (I'm not going to disclose it since it is an in-house Apple software), and memory limitations is not a technical issue at all, just a cosmetic one. My current config is a basic 2.26 single cpu model with 24 gigs of ram, and even with SystemProfiler clearly stating that there are only 16 available, the real workload usage by memtest was nearly close to 23 gigs once the test itself was running.
So far this is a great result for me since the "lucid" members of the community are boycotting the Xserve subject like an epidemic desease. I personally don't care much about all this kindergarten stuff, really we are all persons, we all have to feel something, but this place is a community, not an isolated underground criminal unit so you have to keep your mouth shut under the threat of life. (end of lyric off topic)
Now back to serious things. I would not discover that the clear FW dump provided by Apple with no board identification data inside nor NVRAM config stored inside gonna work out of box without panics or else If only I could flash anything at all using more "tender" methods like people briefly shared here. I mean the corrected CRC32 efiupdater file so It neglect the different mac pro firmware protection checksum. I barely haven't been able to flash anything using the bless command or stock apple firmware update utilities for xserve. I have a guess that the drive modules or the non-raid card is here the ones to blame since I saw exactly same error code patterns trying to update the firmware with an NVMe coupled to a sintech adapter in a MacBook Air. Meaning that without an Apple HDD you basically can't update the firmware by any means. Excluding Dosdude1 tool wich worked great when my cheap test clip failed. I have a friend good ad soldering and logic board repair, so I am not afraid of getting a "bricked" mobo in one of the two xserves I own, but at the moment my actions taken to get the xserve running nvme, 6 cores and thunderbolt are looking similar to a monkey giggling with a grenade rather to a technical approach. So I need some testers with a soic clip being ready to literally burn their logic board to achieve Mac Pro's modularity in a rack unit form. Hope for your support and knowledge sharing.
And sorry for such a long "essay"

I have a complete spare dual processor mobo that came with the « maintenance kit » one thing is different on those : they dont have some of the connector welded on.

the mobo in my machine have the little frank and the big frank connector, but the spare motherboard just have the pads but no connector on it.

let me know how i can help, where are you located?

I was offering to buy a machine for the groupe to do développement on it without screwing anyone’s machine, but the persone you were refering to live in a country with enormous custom duties based on the actual retail price on the machine new so it was like over a 1000$ just to get him a base machine.

I have 2 complete xserve dual cpu , one with the raid card and one without.

and i have one extra naked mobo.

if you point me to what and where I have to buy, and if it is not like 5k I’m willing to either test myself or get the equipment to you to get it done.

I guess line everything firmware related, as soon as we will make enough noise here demonstrating that a xserve could be updated just as good as a cMP, apple will probably do something about it and have someone look at it to make a « official upgrader.

I would totally pay apple 50/100$ to buy a true and trusted xs144.000.00 firmware that turn a XS 3.1 into all the bells and witzel of a cMP running mojave x5690, and all the rest.

side note :
I think i remember something about using windows to put the LSI contrôler of the apple xserve raid card into « maintenance mode, and that turn it into a regular disk controler with no raid fonction, and then on mac os reboot any mention to raid card is erased.

those card have no real avantage as they are slow as **** and only handle raid 0-1-5.

one last thing just in case i forgot to write it here :

I am very successfully using netapp DS4246 24 bay disk shelves with areca 1880xi raid card.

you just need a minisas to qsfp+ cable.

I have raid 42 TB raid 50 array that read write well over 1500Mb/s and you can chain up to 6 shelves behind the xserve on one raid card.

those shelves are around 500 to 700$ right now. the raid card are 150/200$
so for less than 1000-$ you have 42Tb of entreprise grade raid 50 storage.
apparently you can upgrade the original 2Tb drive to whatever you want as long as it is true datacenter drive with no trle.

get them fast before linux and windos guy realize they are not proprietary like evrybody think they are...

they are built like a rock and everything is redundant and horswapable : PSU, sas contrôler etc.

there is even a sas 12 g contrôler upgradable

 

[ezylstra]

Anyone who flashed their 3,1 to cMP4,1 or cMP5,1--did you try 1333MHz DDR3 RAM? Going from cMP4,1->cMP5,1 and using a Westmere chip enable them to run the faster RAM (following an NVRAM reset).

 

[mav2287]

Any progress on this? I would love to be able to upgrade the proc on my Xserve!

 

[donluca]

I'm still looking for a backup machine and found an XServe 3,1 for quite cheap.

I'd love to see some progress here before wasting money.

So far, if I understood correctly, people have been able to:

Flash the latest Mac Pro 5,1 bootrom (144.0.0.whatever) and obtain native NVMe and AFPS booting capability.
This made them lose the leds but you can apparently gain them back thanks to a software someone posted there before which is hosted on github.

This enable people to use also 6 cores westmere and (I guess) 1333Mhz RAM.

So, what is still not clear is: all we have to do is just get the 144 boot rom from Mojave and flash it with ROMTool like we did on Mac Pro 3,1 on the XServe and we're good to go?

Or are there extra steps needed?

 

[donluca]

Friendly bump and a nudge to @nos1609 who managed to get this working.

Can you kindly provide a step by step guide?

I’m mainly interested in how you baked the initial cMP4,1 firmware and the flash procedure under Linux.
Also, the other part where you extracted the .FD from High Sierra and Mojave: is it necessary? It’s my understanding that once you have the XServe 3,1 flashed to cMP5,1, this will be recognized as a cMP5,1 by macOS. If this is true, you just need to run the installers and they will update the bootrom to the latest one, correct?

 

[reukiodo]

This would really be ideal to get newer 6core CPUs in all the Xserves. I'm also curious if using the cMP firmware will allow BIOS (Windows) booting.

 

[donluca]

Alright, some updates after doing some digging here and there.

First and foremost, we have to understand what we want to do with the xserve 3,1.

It is possible to add microcodes using one of dosdude’s tool you can find here: http://dosdude1.com/apps/

Maybe by just adding the correct microcode we might get Westmere 6 core support, which is nice.

Then, adding APFS and NVMe boot support.

I *think*, but don’t take my word on this, that we can use the same (outdated) procedure used on the cMP3,1-4,1-5,1 as explained here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WNkM9LuGPq1sArO9EedWBHYq14NU7m-mDBLAWWJipyM/edit to get NVMe boot support.

For APFS, we already have the APFS patcher but it’s unknown whether it will work on the xserve 3,1

Next up, flashing another firmware onto the xserve 3,1.

Although it’s still unknown whether we can just straight up flash the firmware of a cMP4,1 (and then flash to 5,1), one of the problems of doing this would be that we would lose the serial number, but it seems there’s a remedy to that by using the Blank Board Serializer, which you just unpack onto a usb pen drive, boot off of it and you can put in back your serial number.
So that’s another one out of the way.

The problem, as stated before, is that it’s unknown if there is the need to do any kind of modification to the 4,1 firmware in order to have it working on the xserve 3,1.

I’m getting really irked at all of this, because there are people out there who have successfully done this and partecipate both in this and netkas’ forums and no one is speaking up and I have to research all of this from scratch, with the risk of bricking someone’s xserve3,1 (or mine, if I’ll ever find a good price on a used one).

EDIT: well, looks like I’ve found something ready to go: https://github.com/abdyfranco/serveros

Who wants to go in first?

EDIT 2: nevermind, this adds support for NVMe but not as boot drives, pretty useless. Back to square 1.

 

[donluca]

Alright, good news, I’ve kept scouring these boards and look what I found…

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mp51-0084-b00-rom-dump-request.2119496/page-16#post-26140185

One guy managed to use that exact procedure from the google docs to achieve NVMe booting on his xserve 3,1!

If we can get APFS and NVMe native booting on xserve 3,1 it would be a huge step forward.

 

[P1ratz]

Sorry if i am uneducated when it comes to what is required when attempting to change firmware from 3,1 to 5,1, but what does enabling NVMe or APFS help us gain?

 

[P1ratz]

Sorry if i am uneducated when it comes to what is required when attempting to change firmware from 3,1 to 5,1, but what does enabling NVMe or APFS help us gain?

I was able to get in touch with Rominator and was told my best bet would be to get in contact with tsialex or dosdude and see if either of them were able to assemble a rom.

I will try and talk to these fellas and see what they say.

 

[P1ratz]

Alright, some updates after doing some digging here and there.

First and foremost, we have to understand what we want to do with the xserve 3,1.

It is possible to add microcodes using one of dosdude’s tool you can find here: http://dosdude1.com/apps/

Maybe by just adding the correct microcode we might get Westmere 6 core support, which is nice.

Then, adding APFS and NVMe boot support.

I *think*, but don’t take my word on this, that we can use the same (outdated) procedure used on the cMP3,1-4,1-5,1 as explained here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WNkM9LuGPq1sArO9EedWBHYq14NU7m-mDBLAWWJipyM/edit to get NVMe boot support.

For APFS, we already have the APFS patcher but it’s unknown whether it will work on the xserve 3,1

Next up, flashing another firmware onto the xserve 3,1.

Although it’s still unknown whether we can just straight up flash the firmware of a cMP4,1 (and then flash to 5,1), one of the problems of doing this would be that we would lose the serial number, but it seems there’s a remedy to that by using the Blank Board Serializer, which you just unpack onto a usb pen drive, boot off of it and you can put in back your serial number.
So that’s another one out of the way.

The problem, as stated before, is that it’s unknown if there is the need to do any kind of modification to the 4,1 firmware in order to have it working on the xserve 3,1.

I’m getting really irked at all of this, because there are people out there who have successfully done this and partecipate both in this and netkas’ forums and no one is speaking up and I have to research all of this from scratch, with the risk of bricking someone’s xserve3,1 (or mine, if I’ll ever find a good price on a used one).

EDIT: well, looks like I’ve found something ready to go: https://github.com/abdyfranco/serveros

Who wants to go in first?

EDIT 2: nevermind, this adds support for NVMe but not as boot drives, pretty useless. Back to square 1.

Some updates on my XServe3,1 Pro conversion
I have successfully flashed the *.FDs from the lastest High Sierra and Mojave builds, and I am surprised that it boots up relatively faster now compared to the stock XServe3,1 B06 bootrom. I have managed to get back my original serial number inserted in the firmware (I'm not going to disclose it since it is an in-house Apple software), and memory limitations is not a technical issue at all, just a cosmetic one. My current config is a basic 2.26 single cpu model with 24 gigs of ram, and even with SystemProfiler clearly stating that there are only 16 available, the real workload usage by memtest was nearly close to 23 gigs once the test itself was running.
So far this is a great result for me since the "lucid" members of the community are boycotting the Xserve subject like an epidemic desease. I personally don't care much about all this kindergarten stuff, really we are all persons, we all have to feel something, but this place is a community, not an isolated underground criminal unit so you have to keep your mouth shut under the threat of life. (end of lyric off topic)
Now back to serious things. I would not discover that the clear FW dump provided by Apple with no board identification data inside nor NVRAM config stored inside gonna work out of box without panics or else If only I could flash anything at all using more "tender" methods like people briefly shared here. I mean the corrected CRC32 efiupdater file so It neglect the different mac pro firmware protection checksum. I barely haven't been able to flash anything using the bless command or stock apple firmware update utilities for xserve. I have a guess that the drive modules or the non-raid card is here the ones to blame since I saw exactly same error code patterns trying to update the firmware with an NVMe coupled to a sintech adapter in a MacBook Air. Meaning that without an Apple HDD you basically can't update the firmware by any means. Excluding Dosdude1 tool wich worked great when my cheap test clip failed. I have a friend good ad soldering and logic board repair, so I am not afraid of getting a "bricked" mobo in one of the two xserves I own, but at the moment my actions taken to get the xserve running nvme, 6 cores and thunderbolt are looking similar to a monkey giggling with a grenade rather to a technical approach. So I need some testers with a soic clip being ready to literally burn their logic board to achieve Mac Pro's modularity in a rack unit form. Hope for your support and knowledge sharing.
And sorry for such a long "essay"

Some updates on my XServe3,1 Pro conversion
I have successfully flashed the *.FDs from the lastest High Sierra and Mojave builds, and I am surprised that it boots up relatively faster now compared to the stock XServe3,1 B06 bootrom. I have managed to get back my original serial number inserted in the firmware (I'm not going to disclose it since it is an in-house Apple software), and memory limitations is not a technical issue at all, just a cosmetic one. My current config is a basic 2.26 single cpu model with 24 gigs of ram, and even with SystemProfiler clearly stating that there are only 16 available, the real workload usage by memtest was nearly close to 23 gigs once the test itself was running.
So far this is a great result for me since the "lucid" members of the community are boycotting the Xserve subject like an epidemic desease. I personally don't care much about all this kindergarten stuff, really we are all persons, we all have to feel something, but this place is a community, not an isolated underground criminal unit so you have to keep your mouth shut under the threat of life. (end of lyric off topic)
Now back to serious things. I would not discover that the clear FW dump provided by Apple with no board identification data inside nor NVRAM config stored inside gonna work out of box without panics or else If only I could flash anything at all using more "tender" methods like people briefly shared here. I mean the corrected CRC32 efiupdater file so It neglect the different mac pro firmware protection checksum. I barely haven't been able to flash anything using the bless command or stock apple firmware update utilities for xserve. I have a guess that the drive modules or the non-raid card is here the ones to blame since I saw exactly same error code patterns trying to update the firmware with an NVMe coupled to a sintech adapter in a MacBook Air. Meaning that without an Apple HDD you basically can't update the firmware by any means. Excluding Dosdude1 tool wich worked great when my cheap test clip failed. I have a friend good ad soldering and logic board repair, so I am not afraid of getting a "bricked" mobo in one of the two xserves I own, but at the moment my actions taken to get the xserve running nvme, 6 cores and thunderbolt are looking similar to a monkey giggling with a grenade rather to a technical approach. So I need some testers with a soic clip being ready to literally burn their logic board to achieve Mac Pro's modularity in a rack unit form. Hope for your support and knowledge sharing.
And sorry for such a long "essay"

Can you please let us know How you went about flashing and what modifications you have to make to the firmware?

Would love to have westmeres in my xserve

 

[donluca]

Sorry if i am uneducated when it comes to what is required when attempting to change firmware from 3,1 to 5,1, but what does enabling NVMe or APFS help us gain?

The whole point of the xserve3,1 to cMP5,1 flash is to obtain native NVMe and APFS support and booting. Of course, once the xserve is flashed to cMP5,1 we can also natively install Mojave on it, but that’s not a big deal since you just have to disable the compatibility check in the NVRAM.

I think that if we can manage to get:

1 - NVMe booting
2 - APFS booting
3 - Updated microcodes

flashing the xs3,1 to cMP5,1 becomes pretty meaningless as we already have all the features needed in the xs3,1 firmware.

EDIT: can anyone send me an xs3,1 ROM to tinker with? I’d love to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can inject APFS, NVMe and new microcodes into it. Remember to clear your serial number and wifi/icloud/etc. credentials!

 

[reukiodo]

can anyone send me an xs3,1 ROM to tinker with? I’d love to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can inject APFS, NVMe and new microcodes into it. Remember to clear your serial number and wifi/icloud/etc. credentials!

I can do this if there are steps on how to remove those info...

 

[P1ratz]

The whole point of the xserve3,1 to cMP5,1 flash is to obtain native NVMe and APFS support and booting. Of course, once the xserve is flashed to cMP5,1 we can also natively install Mojave on it, but that’s not a big deal since you just have to disable the compatibility check in the NVRAM.

I think that if we can manage to get:

1 - NVMe booting
2 - APFS booting
3 - Updated microcodes

flashing the xs3,1 to cMP5,1 becomes pretty meaningless as we already have all the features needed in the xs3,1 firmware.

EDIT: can anyone send me an xs3,1 ROM to tinker with? I’d love to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can inject APFS, NVMe and new microcodes into it. Remember to clear your serial number and wifi/icloud/etc. credentials!

Thanks for explaining that! I have a bit of better understanding now.

Is there any specific reason why the people who have succeeded in doing this would not want to release files or info on how to do it?
[doublepost=1563291774][/doublepost]

I can do this if there are steps on how to remove those info...

The whole point of the xserve3,1 to cMP5,1 flash is to obtain native NVMe and APFS support and booting. Of course, once the xserve is flashed to cMP5,1 we can also natively install Mojave on it, but that’s not a big deal since you just have to disable the compatibility check in the NVRAM.

I think that if we can manage to get:

1 - NVMe booting
2 - APFS booting
3 - Updated microcodes

flashing the xs3,1 to cMP5,1 becomes pretty meaningless as we already have all the features needed in the xs3,1 firmware.

EDIT: can anyone send me an xs3,1 ROM to tinker with? I’d love to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can inject APFS, NVMe and new microcodes into it. Remember to clear your serial number and wifi/icloud/etc. credentials!

I can do this if there are steps on how to remove those info...

The whole point of the xserve3,1 to cMP5,1 flash is to obtain native NVMe and APFS support and booting. Of course, once the xserve is flashed to cMP5,1 we can also natively install Mojave on it, but that’s not a big deal since you just have to disable the compatibility check in the NVRAM.

I think that if we can manage to get:

1 - NVMe booting
2 - APFS booting
3 - Updated microcodes

flashing the xs3,1 to cMP5,1 becomes pretty meaningless as we already have all the features needed in the xs3,1 firmware.

EDIT: can anyone send me an xs3,1 ROM to tinker with? I’d love to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can inject APFS, NVMe and new microcodes into it. Remember to clear your serial number and wifi/icloud/etc. credentials!

As soon as I receive mine and figure out how to dump it i will send mine as well.

 

[P1ratz]

Mattc79 appears to have booted from NVMe via apfs here

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/nvme-support-for-3-1.2183518/

He details how to do it as well.

 

[donluca]

On a MacPro 3,1, not an xserve, but the procedure should be the same.

EDIT: to expand a bit, he did *exactly* what I intended to do with the xs3,1.

First, use the APFS ROM patcher to add APFS support to the xs3,1 ROM and *then* use UEFITool + RomTool to extract the NVMe driver from the cMP5,1 firmware in Mojave’s installer and inject it into the xs3,1 ROM and flash it back.

Looks like it’s doable, which means that there’s really no need to go through the hassle of flashing a completely different ROM on the xs3,1 and then do some hacking to get back LOM and the hard drive activity leds.

 

[P1ratz]

On a MacPro 3,1, not an xserve, but the procedure should be the same.

EDIT: to expand a bit, he did *exactly* what I intended to do with the xs3,1.

First, use the APFS ROM patcher to add APFS support to the xs3,1 ROM and *then* use UEFITool + RomTool to extract the NVMe driver from the cMP5,1 firmware in Mojave’s installer and inject it into the xs3,1 ROM and flash it back.

Looks like it’s doable, which means that there’s really no need to go through the hassle of flashing a completely different ROM on the xs3,1 and then do some hacking to get back LOM and the hard drive activity leds.

Are you going to attempt this on your xserve?

 

[donluca]

I don’t have one unfortunately.

I need a backup machine should my cMP5,1 die suddenly and I’m on the lookout for either an xserve3,1 or a cMP3,1. I’d prefer the xserve as it has support for CPUs which have the SSE4.2 instruction set, but we’ll see what comes up.

If I had an xserve 3,1 I would have already attempted to do this.

 

[P1ratz]

I don’t have one unfortunately.

I need a backup machine should my cMP5,1 die suddenly and I’m on the lookout for either an xserve3,1 or a cMP3,1. I’d prefer the xserve as it has support for CPUs which have the SSE4.2 instruction set, but we’ll see what comes up.

If I had an xserve 3,1 I would have already attempted to do this.

Ohh my bad, i thought u had one

Well mine will be arriving tomorrow with a single cpu board and i plan on buying a dual board if i can find one, as well as i have an x5690 in my mp5,1 so i can pull that to experiment in the xserve with.

Ill try what you intended to do hopefully on Thursday and post any issues i have.

I dont have a lot of experience with this as the only thing ive done was flash my mp4.1 to 5,1 and install a x5690 in it.

But im sure with the help of you and others in this community we can figure it out

 

[donluca]

Just be careful as you can potentially permanently brick your xs3,1.

So be aware of the risk involved, we’re threading on (almost) new ground here and mistakes might be fatal.

Personally, I’d start with little steps, using first the APFS ROM patcher to achieve native APFS booting, then trying adding NVMe and, lastly, trying to add new microcodes to support your x5690.

EDIT: of course, first make sure you have the newest official bootrom installed, whatever that is.

EDIT 2: to add new microcodes, this seems the best course of action: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ode-update-guide.2122246/page-2#post-26151850

 

[P1ratz]

right on! Thanks for the help man i really appreciate it!

I will post throughout the process and take as many screenshots or pictures as possible to hopefully put together a well written guide.

Cant wait for it to arrive tomorrow

 

[donluca]

Don’t get too excited and double and triple check everything before doing anything.

As I said: you’re playing with fire and, unfortunately, if you mess up it’s a one way ticket to never get your machine working again (unless you want to desolder the chip and reprogram it).

First, set the machine up with the latest officially supported system (I think that’s El Capitan) and see if everything works correctly.

From there, start slowly patching your firmware, one step at a time, and always check that whatever you did worked before going onwards.

If you can, document step by step here so if something goes wrong we can try troubleshooting.

EDIT: so Rominator *DID* manage to flash the cMP5,1 bootrom to his xserve 3,1: http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,13808.msg38142.html#msg38142

Looks like he didn’t do much, he probably just got the firmware off an installer and put it in with Rom Tool. Uh…

 

[P1ratz]

Okay sweet! Is there any prep work i can do today or anything i should download/setup?