[OmniOS-discuss] [smartos-discuss] Re: Supermicro IPMI based BIOS update

[Keith Wesolowski]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 10:34:50PM -0500, wuffers wrote:

> It's kind of interesting that they're trying to charge for it (at least
> that's the assumption with an "activation key"). It's useful, but outside
> of the "fix corrupted BIOS" (which would probably save themselves $$$), not
> worth a premium. How hard is it to update the BIOS manually by hand
> anyways?

On one system, or on 1000?

My perspective on this is that being able to upgrade firmware over the
LAN interface is an essential manageability feature.  That many don't
have it, that there's no standard interface that seems to be seeing
adoption, and that some are trying to charge extra for it are borderline
criminal.  Booting to DOS, even FreeDOS with scripts baked into every
system's boot media, in order to fix *the vendor's bugs* with an upgrade
is really only an option if the alternative is to go out of business.
It's too slow, too disruptive, too difficult to automate safely, and
requires too much effort relative to its plausible utility.

What's even more obnoxious is that it's usually impossible to preserve
settings across a firmware upgrade, and that there's generally no way to
export or import settings or set them noninteractively.  These are all
obvious holes in basic manageability functionality and most vendors seem
either not to care or to view basic and obvious functionality as
"value-adds" and thus opportunities to extract more money from their
customers.

These shortcomings are not trivial.  They make manufacturing,
integration, and deployment costly, slow, and difficult, and they make
post-deployment management and even validation impossible.  And that's
if you're doing business with a single vendor.  Add a second and you can
forget it; you need an army the size of Google's just to keep up with
the infinite variations, formats, proprietary tools, and nonstandard
protocols.

Very much appreciate everyone out there fighting the good fight on this
stuff.  When you win, we all win!