Tracy Reed <[email protected]> writes: > > If you think SuperMicro is shipping you a "bug-free BIOS", you're fooling > > yourself. > > No, it surely has bugs. Bug their bugs have not bitten me. Therefore I suspect > they are less serious or less numerous.
I've been bitten by SuperMicro bios bug, of course, I was buying a socket G34 /right/ when it came out, and that is never the best idea. The problem was caught during burn-in and a bios upgrade solved my problem. The supermicro stuff, if you assemble it using the proper precautions, is pretty solid, but it's not bulletproof, not anymore than the standard x86 stuff by other vendors is. Anyhow, from what I've seen, there's not all that much difference in the /product quality/ between dell and supermicro, it's more about how it's sold. For someone who likes grubbing around inside computers, who has been doing so for the last fifteen years, the support offered by dell and hp has negative value. If it's something obvious, sure, dell or hp can come out and fix it for you. But you've got to sit on hold, take the guy through troubleshooting, etc... and in that time, I could have just swapped the goddamn power supply myself. it's easy. Now, if I didn't have that experience, sure, it'd be different, talking to dell, I'm sure, would be easier than doing it myself and getting dust all over my nice suit. Now, when you get a /hard/ problem; something where you are not entirely sure if it's hardware or software, for me, the value of support swings massively to the negative. Do you know how hard it is to get dell to replace a maybe flaky motherboard? it takes a hell of a lot more than $250 worth of effort, even when it's only a $100 motherboard. It's worse for most peripherals. When a drive fails a SMART test, I return it to western digital. They send me a refurb. everyone is happy, and minimal effort is expended. When a drive fails a SMART test but still appears to work in a dell? I have to explain to three different idiots what "SMART" is and why that means the drive should be replaced. On top of that, dell shortens the warranty on both disks and ram, the parts most likely, in my experience, to go bad. When I was younger and still trying to find my place in the world, I asked my mentor about swag and bribes that vendors gave customers. I was, at the time, trying to set myself up as a headhunter and/or body shop, as at the time, I seemed to be giving headhunters rather a lot of successful leads, without getting any money out of it myself. He told me something to the effect of "same world, different universe" - There are people for whom that sort of thing is important. The salesguy in the suit, the whole dog and pony show. I think it's stupid, but that is because while I live in that world, I am in a completely different universe. There's no way for me to understand why the sales process for those sorts of people works how it does. I could come up with better people than any body shop. For less money. But that's not what body shops are about. To me, the only rational explanation is that there are large kicbacks and bribes going on behind closed doors. This is possible, but the far more likely answer, I think, is that I think this because the truth makes absolutely no sense to me. It's a different universe with different laws. If I tried to be a body shop, even /if/ kickbacks are appropriate I'd probably present them in the incorrect manner or something. The thing of it is, just like dell isn't selling you servers, a headhunter/body shop isn't just getting you good people. In fact, to the sort of people who do business with those organizations, the actual product being sold is, at best, tertiary. I can get you better people than any body shop I've seen, with pretty minimal effort. It's well known that the people supplied by body shops tend towards the mediocre. (the good ones get higher paying or more stable jobs right quick.) that's not why you go to the body shop. It sounds crazy to me, of course, but I know I showed up to help some guy with his brand new HP servers. Turns out, his hot and ground were reversed. After I mentioned this and the problems this solved he mentioned that he felt all tingly when he used the rack (which was in his garage) barefoot. These people should be in 'the cloud' as far away from real hardware as possible. Sure, it costs a whole lot more, but what is the cost of getting zapped every time you go out to make a configuration change to your apache server? Even to this day, for people who are unwilling to use a wrist strap, I tell them they are better off, probably, just buying everything from dell and /never opening the servers/ never. I make some joke about them letting the magic smoke out, but the truth is that if it doesn't break the server right away, most people are incapable of making the connection between actions they took two months ago and the server that is going flaky today. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
