OK, I have two three Special Someones tonight to discuss.

The first is Supermicro, because there’s the least to rant about. Namely, when I wrote my last post, it did not take very long at all for someone from an IP address that resolved to Supermicro to respond to my post; less than an hour. It typically takes a day for their tech support to respond to an actual request for help, and even then it’s generally a cryptic one-line answer that makes me more confused as to how their products (don’t) work. Especially when dealing with their terrible IPMI card for the PDSMA motherboard- what gets it working is completely different from what their tech support and documentation says. For a department of our size, we’re buying a lot of products from them. We may not be big customers, but we’ve been loyal customers, goddamnit, and now I would like to see about buying future needs from other vendors due to SuperMicro not just sucking, but rubbing it in my face how much they suck through my own website. If anyone wishes to elaborate on this, I will.

Next up is Seagate. We purchased 16 750 GB SATA-II drives from them. We expected them to work as SATA-II drives, yes? They come pre-installed with the little jumpers that force them to work as SATA-I drives. No big deal normally; the average home user wouldn’t ever tell the difference. However, when you’re trying to get them to work with a SAS backplane and controller that the hardware vendor says “Well, yeah, it kind of sucks, sorry you had to buy our product to find out” with, it’s a Big Deal. We’d be getting all sorts of data errors across the 16 drives, and things just Wouldn’t Work.

Why didn’t I remove the jumpers? Because I didn’t know they were there. These things measure about 1mm x 1mm x 2mm. They’re small. With my Wonderful Awesome depth perception under the harsh fluorescent glare of the machine room, I thought at first they were colored plastic bases for the pins, so you knew exactly which ones to jumper. Then, I noticed they were jumpers, but so small that either they were blocks to discourage random jumpering, or that they were configured like that for SATA-II from the factory.

Only after the “Storage Doctor” commented about SATA-II did I figure on forcing the drives to act as SATA-I. So, after spending too much time looking through crappy documentation, I realized those drives were jumpered. So I took out the jumpers, and found the only dead drive in the batch (you order lots of drives at once, you expect a lemon or two). The system is working more or less alright now.

And, finally, the Wheel Of Suck turns to the Portland Group. They make a set of really handy compilers for Fortran and C/C++. There is, however, a big problem. The model I’m hacking on won’t compile with the latest version (7.0). It didn’t compile under 6.2 either, leaving us stuck with 5.2. It’s not my problem- it throws an Internal Compiler Error, which means their compiler broke somewhere on the inside. I tried to get help. I’ve been sending them weekly emails since June 22nd. Until I get an answer, I’m going to start emailing them twice a week. Then three times a week. I might just set up a cron job to get their attention. Something has to be done.

Categories: Geeky Peawee