During my recent build of the vHydra server I found myself rather frustrated with Supermicro for a couple of reasons.

Firstly their UK distribution doesn’t seem to be working particularly well as there’s a two week wait for most parts which are apparently shipped from the US on demand. There are UK based resellers (I tried www.boston.co.uk) but even then some parts still have a long lead time (around a week) and I found them to be expensive compared to alternative web based vendors.

Secondly their technical support was somewhat lacking. Once I’d built the server I found I was getting an overvoltage warning on the second, empty, CPU socket. As I was planning on populating this socket (once the second CPU and heatsink arrived, another three weeks wait :-() I was keen to know if this was a false positive or whether the board should be returned as faulty.

I emailed Supermicro technical support who went through the usual information gathering – firmware, BIOS, motherboard details etc. They identified that the IPMI firmware was out of date Continue reading Supermicro teething troubles and voltage warnings →