[OmniOS-discuss] [smartos-discuss] Supermicro BIOS updates

[Paul B. Henson]

On 7/9/2013 8:46 AM, Keith Wesolowski wrote:

> The solution here is to press -- hard -- on your sales rep to
> provide those changelogs.

Yeah, I don't exactly have a sales rep ;), my day job doesn't use
Supermicro, and the bits and pieces I buy for myself or other projects
don't exactly make me a major customer :).

> We push on them, and if more people are pushing they will have more
> incentive to clean this up.

On the bright side, I got a fairly quick response from technical support
when I requested them.

> Yep.  And what is available is often maddeningly short on details,
> assuming you can even read it.  It helps if you understand Mandarin,
>  to overlay that language's grammar onto the English words in the
> documents.

Yes, there were definitely some of those ;) :

12.Improved OOB BIOS Configuration feature with .DAT less solution.

34. Fixed after use AMIBCP tool to modify the "Restore on AC Power Loss"
item and check the setting in the setup menu will be change.

> But still, push hard.  Make them clean this up -- better documents,
> posted automatically.  They'll do it if they have the right
> incentive.

I complained a bit to tech support about not having the change logs
online, I don't know that I have the leverage to do much more. Hopefully
guys like you with your major purchases will have better luck twisting
their arm.

> You might consider having a look at
> https://github.com/joyent/sdcboot.

Cool, thanks for the pointer.

> The BMC remote media (it's not really part of IPMI) is

Yah, I know, it's one of the few places I'm not technically accurate, 
it's just easier to discuss in some circles if you don't make the 
distinction.

> horrible and usually doesn't work; it also requires a lot of manual
> intervention to use.

I've had pretty good luck with remote media, but I suppose if the one 
time it happened to flake out on me was during the middle of flashing 
the BIOS that would kind of suck :(, so it's probably worth sticking a 
USB stick in.

Thanks for the help…