On Mon, September 8, 2014 9:19 am, Mark Tinberg wrote:
>
> On Sep 6, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, September 6, 2014 2:27 pm, Jonathan Billings wrote:
>>>
>>> I choose vendors that make it relatively painless to apply the firmware
>>> updates under Linux.
>>
>> This is only so for either very rich, who can afford to have stand by
>> hardware to replace bricked by flashing box, or very happy to the level
>> they don't care that the box will not come back up in next 5 min. I am
>> definitely neither of two?
>
> I?ve used mostly Dell and have done a thousand firmware updates in my time
> and I?ve never seen a piece of hardware bricked, their update system takes
> all due precaution, so the problem just isn?t as dire as you make it out
> to be, even anecdotally it is statistically improbable, either I am a
> massive outlier or you are way overestimating.
Certainly the last: it is me who is scared to take 1:10000 chance.
Speaking of Dell: we use only lowest end of their boxes (think 32 GB quad
core CPU _Desktop_ today) which are en par with others price wise, yet
very reliable. Never had to flash BIOS on these, and never had one failed
because of me not having BIOS updates flashed routinely... As far as
servers are concerned, these are tyan mostly. I do not re-flash their BIOS
routinely. (And I doubt they release tons of BIOS upgrades, at the very
most one per board during its lifetime which never sounded "do it or your
box is dead tomorrow".) So, I maybe flashed BIOS 3-4 times per maybe 200
machines... Never had box bricked due to flashing. (Still...) And never
had failure due to not doing "preventive" re-flashing. But after all:
maybe I'm just extremely lucky ;-) and at the same time awfully scared (to
fix something that shouldn't be broken IMHO).
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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