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0 pointssteve19772y ago0 comments

If I have server under maintenance with Dell or HP, they would replace the server or component for me in such a case.

Which would probably be a lot faster than trying to find someone who could maintain some non-standard firmware (as good as it might be).

Even if I had to replace the server on my own cost it would probably still be cheaper. And it would be easy to replace because it's commodity hardware, that was kind of my point.

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EvanAnderson2y ago

I have had experiences with tens of Dell servers with the same model NIC having the same fault. The servers were absolutely under maintenance. I fought with tech support for weeks before I was finally told it was a driver/firmware issue and that I had to work around it (and lose performance for the sake of reliability).

Maybe if I had hundreds of servers Dell would have helped me out. At the scale of tens they told me to take what I got. The Customer got a lower performance solution and nobody anywhere could help them for any amount of money, short of replacing the gear.

That's just a performance issue. I've heard horror stories about reliability-- All the way down to disk firmware and RAID controllers. I consider myself lucky.

steve1977OP2y ago

Not saying things like that don’t happen.

But how much effort (or money) do you think it would have taken to fix this issue if the NIC firmware was open source?

And with standard hardware, depending on the model, you might have had the option to add dedicated PCIe NICs for example. Not great, but at least something. Now try that with something proprietary (as in non-standard) like this Oxide system.

dist1ll2y ago

Replacing hardware? Sure, they'll help. What about debugging firmware though? I'm curious how much help you would get from Dell fixing and patching complicated firmware errors. A side benefit of the openness is that firmware issues can be discussed publicly, and the patches can be upstreamed into the main repo and made available to every customer (and even competitor). This gives you the kind of network effects that you'd never see in a locked-down ecosystem.

steve1977OP2y ago

> What about debugging firmware though? I'm curious how much help you would get from Dell fixing and patching complicated firmware errors.

If they replace the broken component with a working component, then I don’t care how they fix their firmware errors.

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0 pointssteve19772y ago0 comments

If I have server under maintenance with Dell or HP, they would replace the server or component for me in such a case.

Which would probably be a lot faster than trying to find someone who could maintain some non-standard firmware (as good as it might be).

Even if I had to replace the server on my own cost it would probably still be cheaper. And it would be easy to replace because it's commodity hardware, that was kind of my point.

0 comments

EvanAnderson2y ago

That's just a performance issue. I've heard horror stories about reliability-- All the way down to disk firmware and RAID controllers. I consider myself lucky.

steve1977OP2y ago

Not saying things like that don’t happen.

But how much effort (or money) do you think it would have taken to fix this issue if the NIC firmware was open source?

dist1ll2y ago

steve1977OP2y ago

> What about debugging firmware though? I'm curious how much help you would get from Dell fixing and patching complicated firmware errors.

If they replace the broken component with a working component, then I don’t care how they fix their firmware errors.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse