Text 14977, 89 rader
Skriven 2006-12-31 08:51:38 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>



http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36635

===
YOU NEVER QUITE wrap your head around how anti-consumer Microsoft's policies
are until they bite you in the bum. Add in the customer antagonistic policies
of its patsies, HP in this case, and vendors like Promise, and you have quite a
recipe for pain. Guess what I did today?

It started out quite simply, a client needed to set up a small branch office,
something I do almost every week. Four workstation and a repository for files,
occasional backups, and a shared printer is all they would need, nothing
special. 5 HP 5100s, a printer, a Promise TX2300 with mirrored drives and a
DVD-R was all I needed. That was the easy part.

Out came the anemic 40GB drive from one HP, and in when the Promise controller
and two WD 200GB SATA drives. The TX2300 was a snap to set up, the hardest part
was rebooting 10 times until I caught that CTRL-F is the key to get into the
card BIOS. A minute later, the RAID was built and it was time to restore the OS
from the CDs. Two thumbs up to Promise here, it really could not be easier.

This is where the pain began. Microsoft has a policy where the vendors can't
ship you a Windows CD so instead they have to send you a series of restore CDs.
These option-free exercises in rookie programming mistakes are a shining
example of what is wrong with the industry. HP, like the weak willed
jellyfishes that they are, went along with this plan rather than stand up for
the people paying them.

The problem? The #*(&$ers at HP made it so the brain dead restore scripts would
not see any hardware other than the parts they shipped, and it would not
recognise the Promise controller. Fair enough, it isn't HP's duty to recognise
everything, that would be well beyond anything I expected. You just press F6
and install the drivers manually, it gives you the standard Windows prompt
there.

Looking past the problem of the machine not having a floppy, you can easily add
one for the initial install, things got ugly quick. The problem? Those weasels
at Captain Junior Spy Central disabled the F6 driver install on their restore
CD! There is no Windows CD so you can do it manually, you either use theirs or
have your own copy.

If you have a copy of XP to use, guess what? The key that comes with the HP box
is restricted to the version of Windows on the restore CD. Vanilla XP will not
work, nor will any of the copies I have lying around. Your choice, use only HP
hardware or buy a copy of XP. A big FU to MS and HP for this little ray of
sunshine.

Money grubbing and brain dead tactics aside, I figured I could boot from the
Promise CD and possibly manually format the drives and dump the install CDs to
the HD. That trick will often work to get you by initial unrecognised drives.
That is when I learned half of the problems with Promise, the CD it provides is
not bootable and contains nothing resembling a tool. Sparse would be a step up
from what it offers.

Biting back my fervent desire to throw this mess out of a window, get a gun,
and go to Redmond, I put in the original HD and booted into it to see if there
were any interesting tools to help my plight. I tried to install the drivers
and noticed the second problem, the #($?ing Promise CD doesn't have drivers on
it! No, I am not kidding, they ship the card with a CD, but that CD has no
drivers on it! Honestly.

If you click the install drivers option, it prompts you to put a disk in the
(nonexistent) A: drive to make a driver disk. There is no option to unpack, no
option to put it in any other location, you are just screwed. Manually browsing
the CD comes up with the same programs the moronic installer offers you. A:
drive or the highway. In this day and age, there is no excuse for not shipping
a driver with hardware, Promise really screwed this up.

So, unable to transfer the install easily, unable to legally use a different CD
of Windows with my legally purchased key, and unable to install the drivers
with the one I had, I was left with only one option. The machine was put in
place Saturday running Ubuntu. The owner of the chain was informed of it, why
it was done, and what the ramifications, mainly stability and security, were.

Luckily, he is a smart man, and from this point on, Linux will be the OS of
choice on all his servers, it is cheaper to buy, cheaper to install, and much
more secure. Desktops are under evaluation, but Microsoft lost this chain for
sure on the server side. If it doesn't think their brain dead policies are
costing them money, I am proof positive that they are, and I am willing to bet
I am far from alone. æ
===

  /m

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