BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns At some point in every successful IT vendor's lifecycle, their infrastructure gets so vast and monolithic that navigating their support network is pretty much impossible for everyone but the vendor's people themselves – and sometimes not even them. "So you see," I tell the Boss, "I log …
We're in the process of decommissioning a lot of HPE gear. The abomination that is their "support" center was one of the minor reasons for switching server/storage vendors.
Unfortunately, we're also still tied to IBM for the near future. And I can only assume that HPE took lessons from them.
OH GOD, we just bought in december 2017 a crap load of HPE OfficeConnect switches and some ProLiant servers... but even if we have multiple volume licenses for Server 2016 bought directly from MS and we provided them with the license info, HPE REFUSED to even send us a single damned install disk with drivers for the servers and the stupid "HPE Intelligent Provisioning" wizard built in the bios was malfunctioning with the standard MS installers (we download the ISO for Server 2016 directly from Microsoft VLSC).
HPE's "Intelligent Provisioning" was causing this dreadful message to appear when trying to install Server 2016:
"Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation."
NO SHIT SHERLOCK... the drivers were built into the damn BIOS and installed by the installer wizard provided by HPE, how much more "valid" do you want to get?
Intel servers FTW - we've got a couple with good track records.
At first we were wary, but times were tough, so we took the leap.
The downside is that most Intel kit is not built to last forever, whilst HPE (and others) are built to last, but the upside of this is that you are able to afford a new Intel server every two (or three) years, whereas with HPE (and others' kit) you have to grin and bear it until the BOFH slush fund Bossly Unit's CC is full enough to go out and purchase some pretty HPE kit - and have a major hissy fit with driver installation.
So far I never had any issue installing Windoze Server on Intel kit. HPE is another matter though...
Plus, how is that HP and Dell, (who between them probably sell a good proportion of all the web servers in the world), both still have websites which are intolerably slow? Do they not have some spare hardware knocking about?
Don't even get me started on the palava that is trying to burn a copy of the HP firmware update iso onto USB.
Apparently Amazon reckon that if their pages have a 100ms extra lag time, then they lose 1% of global sales
Amazon sells stuff that people WANT, and if they can't get it from Amazon they go elsewhere.
HP and DELL support have something that people NEED, and can't easily get somewhere else (and even though incompetence is widely available anyway, people often prefer the vendor's incompetence over a third party)
"...even though incompetence is widely available anyway, people often prefer the vendor's incompetence over a third party..."
They even prefer paid incompetence over free incompetence. And may even be disturbed is the free incompetence is slightly less so than what has been paid for.
Never had an issue getting it on to USB, the issue I have is that you can enter proxy sever addresses but can't enter credentials, so it's completely useless behind an authenticated proxy.
And the sheer genius of HPE making you have a support contract before you can download it from their website, but leaving it free to download on their FTP site...
And the sheer genius of HPE making you have a support contract before you can download it from their website, but leaving it free to download on their FTP site...
That can't be anything but FTP access left open from when they uploaded the drivers, and no-one knowing how to close it.
The HPE website is one reason why I'm not too upset my company won't give me the time to recertify on HP servers.
If I'm not certified I can't touch the warranty stuff and thus have no reason to ever use the site again.
And it also means I can focus on my actual job which is printer repair.
"Through a sickeningly appropriate coincidence, at the moment I pulled up this comments page, your post had 22 upvotes. There must be a ... catch ... somewhere.
I just upvoted your post, and my upvote was also the 22nd one. Synchronicity is alive and well in the universe's cold, cold heart.
When you can only give one upvote to a post.
I would love it if HP would just delete the entirety of their site and replaced it with the usual brochureware site for the products and a link to a drivers page, where, get this you can enter the serial number and it actually has the drivers for the device you entered. Surely not too hard.
Instead we have this piece of tortuously slow site that runs like a monkey with a leaky sack of jizz which makes me want to kill everyone who was involved in writing it. No jury would every convict either.
I managed to find Oracles hidden registered, paying but not paying customer portals just to get hold of java7 installs for jdk's. However there's a reason I've got more grey hairs though...they really really don't want you to have the installs.
Also for the record there's recycling centres in north Leeds but no landfill.... unless you count Bradford and that's to the south west....
Turn the BOFH stories into a suitable PDF, add a topical cover picture with the title artfully added via your graphical editor of choice, and send it off to a Print-on-demand shop.
When you get it back, add a few bloodstains, a bit of discoloration and damage caused by quicklime, and a few brownish patches like some lumps of soil had fallen on it at some point.
Turn the BOFH stories into a suitable PDF, add a topical cover picture with the title artfully added via your graphical editor of choice, and send it off to a Print-on-demand shop.
Really!! After reading all the BOFH stories over the years, you really want to risk doing Simon out of his rights as author?
Really!! After reading all the BOFH stories over the years, you really want to risk doing Simon out of his rights as author?
As long as you're not printing and selling them, just printing one for yourself, use as described, I think you're fine. Else you should be offering him a suitable cut of the profit in a form of his choosing, no? And if it's to keep your cow-orkers and manglement in a state of sullen obedience I expect him to approve anyway.
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