[rescue] Why .* sucks (was Re: FDDI card)

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, February 25, 2002 at 16:40:00 (-0800), Josh Neal wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Why .* sucks (was Re: FDDI card)
>
> As bad as the Intel/Phoenix BIOS-screen-redirect-over-serial may suck,
> they did a better job than, say, Asus/Award.

I'd forgotten about the Asus/Award crap.  You had to remind me!?!?!?!? :-)

As far as I'm concerned they're equally crap though -- the ServerBIOS is
just more frustrating because it promises so much more and on first
glance even appears to try to deliver it!

> Is it as useful as a Real Machine's rom monitor? No, of course
> not. This is PC-class hardware, after all, no matter how many blue
> leds and feel-good marketing lies you add.

Yeah, but people keep insisting on using it to leverage into the server
marketplace.  Now if they'd put real server firmware on it too then I
for one wouldn't complain so much.  It's a real shame to mix all those
mainframe-like IPMI management features (the BMC and all) with that
attrocious 30-year-old PC BIOS crap.

> ObTopicDrift: Has anyone tried LinuxBIOS?
> (http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/index.html) Impressions?

I wish they'd get off their BIOS butts and build some _standard_
IEEE compliant OpenFirmware for i386 instead!  Grrrr....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>