I just wanted a cheap Epyc server... 

Wow, this video posted for you to watch for free about multi-thousand dollar projects might want to keep being able to do it. It was 37 seconds of a 24 minute video with no 3rd party sponsors.

wow that salty comment at his short plug about his in-house quality merch - have a pin of shame

Wow2, you can always just go away and not come back.

@@CraftComputing yeah YT without sponsorblock is just craptastic.

silence, redditor.

At this point we are running out of companies really fast.

when basically telling you to bin the product, and buy a new one? at what was it, 10,000 thousand, something price tag? they basic saying you are not rich enough company for our products?, and you know your right where not?, time do our shopping else where? where we are rich enough to spent our cash? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 🙂

I use some older (E5 v3/v4 era) Quanta servers, they work, but yeah, no support, no manuals, no bios or BMC updates. _Don't use quanta_ just stick to AsRock Rack, Gigabyte and Supermicro servers.

Quanta is really in the business of selling thousands of units at once to large vendors, as well as being an ODM for other large manufacturers. In either case they just don't have public facing support. It's just not how they're structured. It's a shame, but I understand why they do the business that way. It would step on the toes of the actual sellers of their rebranded equipment. I don't disagree with the sentiment though.

@@JosephHalder They wouldn't have to provide support, all that people are asking for is to be able to download documentation and firmware for their old products.

i got sad reading this. fr

Gas lighting the public seems to be a corporate strategy these days.

Well we are certainly showing that large numbers of us are willing to accept outright lies.

@@Codeaholic1 3am musing: It kinda makes you think about how the "rules" of our society only work when both sides are willing to follow them eh? Like, the systems we use only work when both sides actually agree to do the things they say, and actually do them. Like, If a company refuses to honor their side of an agreement, there isn't anything YOU can do about it. You could spend a bunch of time and money to take them to court, but if they really don't want to do a thing it is going to cost you a lot of resources. When things were "smaller" the system just sorta worked. A store sold to townspeople, and pissing locals off could wreck your business. Billion dollar companies do not have that risk. Some are big enough that you literally might not have a choice whether or not to deal with them if you want a specific type of product. That's the consequence of a global economy. Just some "Mind is winding down after a long day" thoughts.

Tiens, je savais pas que tu le suivais aussi ^^ (peut être lié à tes déboires avec ton serveur récemment ?)

@@NamelessUnicorn haha oui je suis a fond dans les homelab depuis quelques mois. Les vieux epyc sont dans mon radar aussi :)

Agree 100% for taking one for the team and being ao transparent to allow us fellow Home lab\Professionals to add this to our mental database to NEVER buy a Quanta piece of hardware! See Quanta fails to understand that some of us Home Lab freaks also have say with purchasing on our day job on purchasing of such new servers and it will be over my dead body on a Quanta approval to pass me now!

I will say from my limited experience reviving a C220 M4 it’s been easy to find support docs and BIOS updates. Having a Cisco support login from work has definitely helped though. Plenty of Cisco proprietary jankiness, but doesn’t sound like they’re nearly as bad as Quanta.

Meraki, the deceivingly cheap ebay listings that probably get oh so many people that have no idea they need a license.

@@stevewalton2959 Or Brocade. Luckily in that case there is a reasonably easy to find community of dedicated "external support people" that have solved most of the problems already.

Liebert pats Cisco on the back and takes its seat in the chat. Had a lead-lag system for a pair of 20-ton Liebert CRACs that no longer exists according to Liebert's customer service, despite the thing being mounted to my wall.

NetApp: *heavy breathing*

But he can't flash the bios.

@@bluesquadron593 with a hardware programmer, even a cheap CH341A, you can flash pretty much all motherboard BIOS chips, usually without even removing the chip from the motherboard

@@bluesquadron593 Nothing a external flasher cant fix.

he needs a SOIC8 clip and a computer that has an SPI flash programmer port (like a BeagleBone Black) and he also needs the programming experience to use the flashrom program

@@tacokoneko in this case, the chip needs to be desoldered from the board (extra bummer). But it should be doable. The problem here is that, if there's no solid backup of the original BIOS image, apparently finding it is very difficult - the OEM certainly can't be trusted to provide it, sad as this sounds...

Its a open compute project node sold only to select customers under NDA, anybody with a legitimate support claim has it available. By the contract it was sold under it cant be resold to others either. This is standard for the OCP hardware from all the large vendors, at best you have the specsheet on website.

I'm enjoying my recent purchase of a Z640. Quite robust

If you work in the industry the server engineers are usually friendly enough to give you the necessary build files. It is how I got a 385 G7 back up and running with HPE software. you can also usually find the necessary tools on-line in server fora, that is reasonably safe to download I believe STH and LeveLOne can be a good source.

You gotta stop looking at this like a Tech/Engineer. If something like this confuses you, try this. Imagine you are an Executive. You don't have to understand anything other than how to make line go up. That is your only job. Now, every day someone uses something they already bought from you, they aren't giving you more money for new stuff. That is where support contracts come in. People paying you money without you having to design/make/store/ship stuff is GREAT. But, it isn't great forever. Eventually they need to buy new stuff, or you don't get to justify your quarterly bonus. Try to be as cynical and poisonous as you can. Doe it make sense now?

​@@Prophes0r It's not logical either, since you ended support for the hardware and they're not likely to buy new hardware either and if they do buy new hardware they're less likely to buy from you. It's a LOSS-LOSS situation, so it makes less sense to give you bonuses when you're actually hurting the company's image and losing clients

Most of this stuff comes from "free" IT recycling companies. They purge the data and sell either directly on a (differently named) website, or an eBay store. The techs usually don't care whether docs or bios' are available... it's still worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

And the marketplaces which facilitate the selling of this junk need to step up and protect their users who are being taken for a ride.

There is always the option of using a rackmount ATX case. If you look in he background of most HomeLab RU-vidrs, especially the lower budget/newer ones, you will see a 4U Rosewill case like the the RSV-L4000U which can be had for $250. (RSV-R4000U is the shorter depth one) Sorry. While looking up the model number I saw there was an open-box one of these for $160 and I bought it immediately before finishing this reply...

@@Prophes0r I looked into a few rackmount options including multiple Rosewill 4U chassis (they have at least two still listed on Newegg), but in the end I went with a used Rosewill Blackhawk: It had enough internal drive bays, good airflow, good clearances for my SP3 tower cooler, and enough external 5.25" drivebays to fit my three 8 x 2.5" SATA bays from Athena Power. I have 24 x SATA SSDs and several NMVe across M.2 and U.2 interfaces, so I wanted something to accommodate all that into one box. I might one day incorporate one or two small to mid-sized racks, but right now it's more of a nice to have.

No one wanted to invest in Zen 1, and AMD told them to use 32Mb modules (it was in their OEM spec design) but didn't have the clout to enforce it and hence why the OEMs cut corners and just shoved out the cheapest working solution they could and why OEMs do not like supporting hardware of this era. I still remember AMD boards with Intel 211 network chips which was approaching EOL being installed just to save money. The other factor was no-one expected AMD to support the socket for as long as they did because they gotten used to Intel changing their sockets at a drop of a hat.

Don't even get me started on vendor locking CPUs....

Dell is one of the only companies I know where you can routinely download server firmware without needing a support contract with them. Their servers aren't as good as Cisco and their support isn't very good either, but they are at least that little bit more consumer-friendly. Cisco requires a support contract to download anything. HPe is the same. Most server manufacturers won't let you download anything without a support contract, which just seems like a bullshit anti-consumer tactic to me and I want the EU to do something about it.

@@mndlessdrwer Me with my dell last week, man. I reset it for a windows update and afterwards it would not post, neither did it give me a fault code. I stripped that thing down and had both CPUs and all the RAM out of it twice, nothing. I contacted the company that sold it to me saying I knew it was out of warranty and asked if there was anything they could do, and to their credit they had a guy go through everything on this system again and maybe a couple things I didn't think of. I swear it was a BIOS issue because 1) no post and no fault code with hardware that was working 3 minutes ago pretty much fits that bill and 2) when I was troubleshooting and doing research I found some claiming that that Dell system had issues initializing some non-dell graphics cards and 3) when I did eventually get it up after doing the same thing 3 times I updated the BIOS and it just seems to be normal again. My point being I went searching for a Dell BIOS for a 6 year old EOL professional system and it was still just there on their customer facing website, and PCSP decided to be cool and had someone try to help even though I was outside the warranty period for their ebay sales (they offer a longer included warranty if you get stuff direct from their website though, so I'll probably go there first when I get the next system).

Not sure this company is worthy of a spot on the wall of shame

It's not dead, just a lot of hassle to get going again

Well at least for NetApp the Disk Shelfs there are usable in the Second Hand market, maybe not with the Software provided by NetApp, but the Hardware can still be used.

The enterprise world has no official 2nd hand market. Quanta doesn't delete anything. They have all of it stored in house. They just do not give out any information unless you have a service contract with them. Which once an enterprise server is decommissioned that is the end of the service contract and the servers get sent to recyclers. That's sadly just how it goes.

This isn't even one of THOSE situations. This is willful intent to ignore the existence of a thing. Customer: Yeah so I have this Quanta server. Can I have the documentation and BIOS for it please? Quanta: I'm sorry. What server? Customer: Model QuantaX111 Quanta: I'm sorry but we don't make that. Customer: You, Quanta, don't make the QuantaX111? It came out 5 years ago. It has your logo on the front panel and your branding on the BIOS. Quanta: No we don't make that. Customer: There is a 1 year old internet archive page of your website showing a product page for the QuantaX111. The latest BIOS update was 10 months ago. Quanta: No, I think you have the wrong Quanta. We don't make that one. Customer: I got this number from the support contract that I bought from you, that is still valid for another 4 months. Quanta: I don't know what to tell you. We certainly didn't make that server. But if you are interested in Quanta servers let me transfer you to our sales team... Customer: No wait....

​@@Prophes0r it is. If you can't fix it, you have to buy something else and throw that out. What was the point of the fictional argument you had? Companies are destroying their documentation for old equipment to make the right to repair disappear

It's an official recreation from the 90s. Screen accurate and made of aluminum. Not sharp at all.

@@CraftComputing Man, I so want one that's made of 440a steel, and sharp... to hang on my wall by the front door of my house. Crazy peeps come 'round, they ain't comin in.

That's basically the only hope I have left.

I don't think "euphemism" was the word you were going for. I'm not actually sure what you meant to say....

I watch my other half throw money away on this kind of gear. He doesn't do any research first, just "cheap.. shiny... oooooo" and ends up with expensive bricks. Personally I like to KNOW the stuff I buy has zero support but can be dealt with.. anything HPE is no later than G7.. I didn't buy it from them and I don't need to pay them for "support" which they won't provide. It's time we got some laws with teeth for these waste producers.

Bring back public shaming.