I am unfortunate enough to have to maintain 30 or so HPProCurve 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?
“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.
“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”
He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”
“if you’re going to pick some kind of sudden sickness to fake your way out of a court appearance don’t choose a heart attack because once they check your vitals it’s a tough one to stick with”:
just a quick note to warn everyone… if you are thinking of going to see the strangers, don’t bother wasting your time or money.
if you want to see it, wait until it comes out on dvd and then go rent it for a buck or two. it’s way too drawn out, and the ending is completely retarded — there should have been more.
totally not worth the $31 or so i spent for us to go see it ($20 for the tickets, plus cokes and popcorn).
“so we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: ‘does anyone get how to do this one? i didn’t get it right and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong.’ exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the dungeon.”
as an educator, i think ryerson university is taking this way too far (based on what i know). if there was blatant cheating going on, then by all means punish those involved. if this is, as the article says, the students were simply using the forum to “brainstorm” in groups then it is completely absurd.
i *encourage* my students to work together in groups. working together in groups in something that higher education should teach you. every one of these students will have to work together in teams once they get out into the “real world” and will have to collaborate with their peers. it should also be common knowledge that having multiple people in your group who can provide their own insights is an asset, and makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.
again, blatant academic dishonesty should be punished. from what i’ve read, however, that is not the case here.
i think i’ve mentioned before that i manage a blackberry enterprise server at work. in the nearly two years we’ve been using it, it’s been running on the free vmware server. we first purchased vmware infrastructure last summer and moving the bes v.m. over to esx has never really been a huge priority.
a few days ago, it was decided that we’d go ahead and move it over. a co-worker handles most of the vmware management but i volunteered to take care of this for a few different reasons (which aren’t really relevant).
so this morning, at 2am, i start working to import the bes v.m. off of the vmware server and onto esx. i spent an hour and a half having nothing but problems. i eventually figured out a way to make it work and, as i write this, it’s at 87% completion.
import directly to a specific esx server (as opposed to a cluster), and
use the credentials for my local account on the esx server (not the credentials i use to access the virtualcenter server — which is tied into active directory).
isn’t that fuckin’ retarded?
it just finished successfully, so it’s time to fire up the “new” v.m. and see how it went. *crosses fingers*
just a quick note to warn everyone… if you are thinking of going to see 
