BIOS updates require a paid-for contract

[Desertsweeper]

I realise i am a little late to the news but since my discovery that I must now pay HP to fix BIOS related issues for their server offerings I am no longer a "customer for life". As a consultant who works with small business using MicroServers and ML Series I see HP loosing this segment of business. I just bought a brand new Proliant ML110 G6 that has been sitting in a warehouse for some years. Now I need to pay HP because it has an early version of their buggy BIOS. No thanks. Never again

[waaronb]

If it makes you feel any better you can still find the latest software on their FTP site if you know how to navigate their weird directory structure.

Plus you can still go to the download page for your product and download almost everything there except for the SPP and maybe a few firmwares since the start of the year. But like I said, you can usually still find things on their FTP site. At least for now. I expect HP to plug those up too eventually.

I'll agree with you that it's pretty lame of HP to do this... I'm trying to think of other examples of hardware vendors (desktop or server) requiring active contracts to get something as basic as a firmware update.

It's more common with things like network gear (Cisco, Juniper, F5, etc) and I hope HP drops this as some bad experiment like New Coke. :)

[jbainbridge]

Indeed. My Microserver N40L won't allow the network port to work with Server 2012R2 without a bios update.

It's a joke.

[waaronb · Accepted solution]

The download page for the ML110 G6 shows the latest firmware for it is August 2011, so there's a very high chance that's on the last firmware CD that HP produced:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/cd/p1040529012/v71197/

You can also find the Windows online update for that firmware at:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/sc-windows-fw-sys/p1034981302/v72288
I guess that's one upside to looking for stuff on older servers is that you can still find the old stuff readily available.

And for the Microserver N40L, there's an offline Softpaq firmware update for it here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/pubsw-windows/p1657370250/v93269

Like I said, you have to know where to look in the HP ftp site. Find the name of the file from the download page for the product and then find that in the FTP server. At ftp.hp.com/pub there's a file they update regularly (or real time?) that's a full recursive listing of the entire structure.

Of course now that I've said that, HP will probably kill this method of getting older stuff.

[Desertsweeper]

Many thanks for the pointers...lets hope they dont plug this to soon...