And people wonder why I hate HP
Written by jlgaddis on May 27, 2009 – 6:07 pm -I am unfortunate enough to have to maintain 30 or so HP ProCurve switches (with another 10 or so almost ready to be installed). I hate them, with a passion. It is impossible for me to accurately convey how much I hate them using mere words alone.
People often wonder why.
The reasons vary. I’ve had “support” respond to me that they cannot reproduce issues in the lab because they don’t have enough GBICs available (well, go fucking get them!). Their “solution” in this case was to offer me a fresh-off-the-compiler “beta” version of the switch firmware. Because I deal with production equipment (you know, stuff I want to work), I always pass. I am not HP’s QA department, nor will I act as such. Here’s why.
Today I was reading through the K.13.63 Release Notes and noticed this “known issue”:
“Transferring a switch configuration of 4,201 bytes or larger to a switch’s /cfg/startup-config directory via SCP will result in the switch coming up on factory defaults or with the new configuration only partly installed after reboot”
Are you fuckin’ kidding me, HP? How does shit like this make it past QA?
Looking at one of my 5400s, I see its startup config is 18,370 bytes. I have a lot of stuff to add to the config on that one, so it will likely easily pass 30k before it’s “done”. Glad I didn’t “upgrade” to this firmware earlier — I would’ve hated to have been the guy to find that issue.
There’s more that I’d share, but I’ll let you browse through the “Fixes” and “Known Issues” sections of the Release Notes for yourself. Look out for phrases like “hang”, “may reboot unexpectedly”, and the like.
Tomorrow, I’ll be receiving one of the new HP ProCurve Threat Management Services zl Modules. My HP sales rep has warned me in advance that “this module is not very intuitive, like many things you may have seen before”. Why am I not surprised?
Tags: hp, networking, stupid | 8 Comments »
May 27th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
‘Our shit doesn’t work? Well, how about a shaky beta of our new shit?’
Nice one, HP.
May 27th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
“Our stuff always works, sometimes”
May 27th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
But they have a lifetime warranty!! LOL!
May 28th, 2009 at 3:51 am
That’s amazing
May 28th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
One thing that rubs me the wrong way is that HP’s Procruve Manager Plus does not support AES encryption for SNMPv3 Priv. Their switches support AES, but for some reason HP does not seem to want their two products to be fully compatible. It doesn’t matter either way since PCM+ is horrible for network monitoring, IMO and it will be replaced (at least in our organization) this summer.
May 29th, 2009 at 6:55 am
That does suck and I know what you mean about HP support – I tried to get them to tell me whether their SX GBICs would support runs longer than 550M with fiber rated longer than that and the impression I got was that the engineering team was two guys in a garage.
That having been said, how is this any different than Cisco? (except the gear costs half as much) It never seems like there’s a stable release (GR) of IOS for Aironet (“using DHCP and TACACS+, yeah we’re going stop stop authenticating over the wire AND at the console!” was one example I got hit by recently.) I’ve yet to find an IOS release that doesn’t eventually start having CEF problems for 3750 switches (This is after 10s of hours working with TAC. You’d think for $10k each they might manage that one.) and for the longest time if you wanted SSH on say a 2800 series router they were all “whoah, what kind of crazy shit is that, you best be running some ED son.”
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:32 am
[...] 5406zl switch running version K.13.60 firmware (yes, I know it’s not the latest — read this to find out why I’m not running K.13.63). In the top session, you see me execute these [...]
September 17th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
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