aac support

[Sean Hafeez]

There has got to be a better way to work with the vendors in order to 
get the support we need. It just seem to me that the "screw you guys, I 
am going home" stuff just does not work. The vendors need a business 
case in order to do things - they are in business to make money and I 
can agree with that. Maybe we can do some sort of list of companies or 
OpenBSD people that use or would use the cards - along with number and 
install base study of the number of sales they would get and give it to 
them. We should work on some sort of cookie cutter type setup that 
tracks the interest and $$ with a product that we can compile and be 
sent to the vendor in order to get support. The data needs to be 
correct and true and presented in a business case manor. The one-off 
flock of emails just do not work. I would be happy to help with this 
and pursue this if there are others that think it is a good idea.

Also is there needs to be a stock form that is send the vendors that 
covers in detail what we ask for. Some that can be vetted by their 
lawyer that they would be OK with.  We need to work with the vendors in 
a clear, clean business like manner and leave emotion and philosophy 
out of it.

This is just my 2 cents. If you do not like it, oh well.


Regards,
Sean Hafeez


"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."

- Lectures On The Electrical Properties Of Materials, L. Solymar, D. 
Walsh






On Mar 19, 2005, at 11:27 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote:

> re: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10032&offset=15&rows=28
>
> See a posting from Scott Long of FreeBSD;
>
> ---
> Thanks for going to a public forum and saying I am full of crap.
>
> I really appreciate that.  Boy, you sure do want to see all of
> our projects do well, don't you.
>
> Apparently you have zero idea of where we are going.
>
> While you are content with shipping binary stuff in your source tree
> and in your ports tree, we are not.  We do not ship binaries.  We are
> not interested in shipping a binary for some CLI.  We actually do have
> the Linux CLI working in emulation, but we will not supply it to our
> user community.  I have cancelled that effort by that developer.  We
> will not supply something to our user community that they cannot fix
> and improve themselves.
>
> We have been talking with Adaptec for 4 months.  They have not
> given us management information.
>
> We have been talking to Adaptec for more than a year to get other RAID
> controller information, as in, how to even get the mailbox stuff
> fixed.  They have not given that to us, either.
>
> Noone thought to talk to you.  You are, I am sure, under a
> non-disclosure agreement with Adaptec, and I am sure you would
> therefore not give us documentation.  We are quite used to FreeBSD and
> Linux people signing NDA's by now.  Yesterday on the phone Doug said
> "But we did give OpenBSD documentation, we gave them to Scott Long".
>
> Thus, Doug mentioned that *you* had documentation, and thought that
> was enough.  Of course it is not.  You do not help us, I told him.
> That is not how it works.  And so it stands -- we still have no
> documentation.
>
> Did I get an offer from you for documentation before you went onto a
> public site and said I was full of crap?  No, I did not.
>
> And I expect that now that you have said I am full of crap, we still
> will get no documentation from you.  Right?
>
>
> We are working on a driver-independent raid management framework.  One
> command (perhaps called raidctl(4), we don't know) that should work on
> any controller from any vendor, which would do management, because the
> management stuff would be abstracted in a driver-independent way into
> each driver.  Yes this is a difficult project.  We have support for
> AMI almost working.  We will support some other product, as well, then
> we'll see where Adaptec stands.
>
> I do a lot of work on OpenBSD.  I am sure that you do a lot of work on
> your stuff in FreeBSD too, so you know what it is to be a very busy
> busy person.
>
> When a vendor ignores me and the efforts of 4 other people trying to
> get the vendor to listen -- for that long, we have no choice.
>
> Yet, you, Scott, you think that you are therefore able to slag us and
> call us wrong, because YOU are in the loop and we are not?  Because
> you used to WORK at Adaptec, and we did not?  That somehow makes us
> full of crap?
>
> I have been watching the mail going to Doug over the last 24 hours.
>
> I have been counting controllers mentioned in mails and am now up to
> over 1,800 Adaptec RAID controllers, with people from very large
> commercial operations complaining that they have been switching to
> other controllers (or, having now seen Adaptec's failure in this
> regard, that they will now actively not buy Adaptec again).
>
> Those controllers will not be supported in OpenBSD 3.7 in May.  If
> Adaptec wishes them to be supported in a future release, they had
> better come and make amends.  We are sick of supporting the hardware
> of vendors who shit on their customers via us.  Maybe they can repair
> this horrid situation enough that we will once again support their
> controllers by the time OpenBSD 3.8 ships in November.
>
> Quite frankly, you don't understand what we are trying to do, and
> Scott, this is just like the binary only Atheros driver that FreeBSD
> ships.
>
> I like it when all hardware is supported with source code, but just
> because our methods for getting there are different than yours, Scott,
> that gives you absolutely no right to go posting such a thing as you
> did there.
>
> Shame on you.
>