On Sep 6, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > On Sat, September 6, 2014 2:27 pm, Jonathan Billings wrote: >> >> I choose vendors that make it relatively painless to apply the firmware >> updates under Linux. > > This is only so for either very rich, who can afford to have stand by > hardware to replace bricked by flashing box, or very happy to the level > they don't care that the box will not come back up in next 5 min. I am > definitely neither of two… I’ve used mostly Dell and have done a thousand firmware updates in my time and I’ve never seen a piece of hardware bricked, their update system takes all due precaution, so the problem just isn’t as dire as you make it out to be, even anecdotally it is statistically improbable, either I am a massive outlier or you are way overestimating. — Mark Tinberg mtinberg at wisc.edu