Why Linux is Often the Answer for Small Businesses
When it comes to installing a local network serving a small office, then software-hardware compatibility is quite important. Shows up that protective corporate barriers result in questionable products, with a vast amount of nonsense embedded. These are not what you want for your small business office. Yes, ads are nice and sounds cool to be trendy, but ultimately it ends up to productivity, stability, security and… your wallet. Read on, see what I mean:
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. Five 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 anaemic 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…
Keep reading on Charlie Demerijan’s blog how he solved this heap of proprietary nonsense.
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