On 2014-09-06, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > I get rackmount > ones assembled by small company (companies) and about 1/2 of cost of > similar hardware from Dell. Those are for the most part based on Tyan > barebones. And during last at least decade I never had a "must to" flash > newer BIOS situation with any of those boxes. You have been lucky, then. I agree that flashing the firmware should be a rare event, but expecting the rate to be exactly 0 is an unreasonable expectation. I have had to flash a BIOS once, and a BMC once, in about 10 years of buying server hardware. (Yes, flashing a BMC probably wouldn't brick a box, but it'd brick getting a remote console, which for me is almost as serious.) I consider that an acceptable bug rate. Flashing a RAID controller is actually more frightening to me--flashing the BIOS isn't likely to hose your data, but an undetected bad flash on a RAID controller could. Sadly my flash rate of my controllers is slightly higher than my BIOS flash rate. --keith -- kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us