All blogs need a good series, I’ve decided to start one on things I hate in the IT industry. These are things which are constantly being done incorrectly by people who should know better, the kind of things which are too embarrassingly pathetic to call “technology”, the kinds of failures of design and implementation that I’d absolutely never ever want my name behind, on or next to. To kick it off, I’m here to say that all LOM systems are god damn terrible.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Lights-Out Management (LOM) and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) consoles are out-of-band management interfaces built into high-end servers for the purpose of remote management when the system is broken or headless (lacks a keyboard and screen etc). There are two things to consider here, the first is that LOM’s are very expensive and some companies like HP (I’m not sure who else) try to license their use annually as well, the second is that LOM’s are extremely valuable when your server is locked in a dungeon, you’re somewhere off-site, and you have lost access to your operating system and something has gone wrong.

So this begs the question, why is it that manufactures have given the task of designing very important software for something which is expensive, and critical to operations, to a university intern who is clearly on drugs? Every single LOM I’ve used has been some disappointingly broken Java applet nonsense. In 1995 Java applets were “cool” and they even occasionally worked, these days they don’t work. I have a Mac and I have Google Chrome, this combination runs almost zero Java applets. If I use Firefox instead, I might manage to start a Java applet after much grief. Now, I can understand the problem set that they think they have, they want to redirect graphics and various things over some custom protocol without writing client tools for all sorts of platforms – after all that is the same unfortunate trap that every delusional Java programmer starts off with. My biggest question is, why not either create a standard protocol and client set for all manufacturers to use and contribute to, or just use one that already exists like VNC. Sure, VNC can’t redirect IO ports for mounting ISO files and such, but I’m pretty sure people would welcome a patch. That way we don’t have each manufacturer having some crack addict team being paid with Dorito’s trying to kludge together their own waste of ROM space and calling it an “Enterprise management system”.

HP, IBM, Dell, Intel. Your software is crap. It’s worse than crap. Crap at least started as something useful to humans. If you expect people to pay good money for LOM systems, make them at least half way work properly so that they don’t cause more frustration than the emergencies they’re supposed to help in. And yes, the VMWare vSphere client sucks too, and it’s even more expensive.