On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 03:15:00AM +0900, Dave Brown wrote: > And as a bonus, the new LOM now has greatly-improved, much-more > intuitive commands! Why would you want to waste your time typing silly > things like "poweroff" and "poweron" which any fool could guess? Now in > the wonderful Age Of The Future, it comes with a variety of commands > that requires you to hit Google when you get called at 2am to figure out > how in the hell to power-cycle the server!
This is one of the reasons why I'm a packrat, stashing any
documentation I can get my hands on into a directory on my laptop.
There's something like 2GB of PDFs and HTMLs and other assorted
hateful documentation on assorted hateful hardware and software in
there now, most of which I've desperately wanted when access to the
internet was broken in some way.
But enough about being clever -- back to the hate. Your fancy new
LOM is probably similar to the fancy new Service Processor (SP) in
my fleet of Sun X2200-M2 systems, which are equally flakey -- every
time someone in the next postal code gets a brownout, my X2200s would
drop. Ok ok, that's Hydro hate (or perhaps more accurately landlord
hate).
But my fancy SP come with a https server which have a fancy web
interface, so that people who can't figure out intuitive things like
> set /SP/SystemInfo/CtrlInfo PowerCtrl=on
...have a simple point and squirt interface (in which the power
on/off link is hidden two or three levels in). THIS monstrosity also
comes with a KVM-over-HTTPS "feature", which is implemented in the
form of an Active-X control that won't work in Firefox, won't work in
Firefox's-IE-tab extension, and... won't work in IE unless you've
explictly added the SP to your "trusted" zone AHEAD OF TIME because:
Windows has blocked this software because it can't verify the
publisher for MdiControl.cab
In IE 6 there was a friendly "hurt me harder please" button that let
you bypass this warning, but in IE7 there isn't, presumably because
it encouraged users to... well... hurt themselves harder. So now you
have to do the trusted zone thing first.
And man, isn't it fun discovering all this when you are on the other
side of the city and some client is yelling at you over the phone
because his compute farm has gone from "productive" to "turning
electricity into heat and noise".
But that's customer hate.
Ahh... so much hate, so little time.
I need a drink.
--
/\oo/\
/ /()\ \ David Mackintosh |
d...@xdroop.com | http://www.xdroop.com
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