OpenBSD Journal

QLogic iSCSI development woes.

Contributed by jj on from the ask-nicely-get-nothing. dept.

Update (Apr 21 2008, 21:46:30 CET):
"Coincidentally", I have just received an update from QLogic in which they emphasize their will to ship us the promised HBAs. Please pause your efforts in sending emails to QLogic for now - it seems it already has helped a lot. I will update you as soon as I hear back from them, which should be end of this week.

On misc@, Stephan A. Rickauer posted this sad story:
In October 2007, I established contact with QLogic to investigate whether they could help us in making iSCSI HBAs work in OpenBSD by donating some hardware and by providing free programming documentation.

Unfortunately, QLogic has chosen to be difficult.
This means, I am forced to make this private communication public to show our user base the truth about how I and all OpenBSD people have been led along and lied to by QLogic. Now it's up to us (=you) to show that we won't put up with that.

This is the original email conversation between me and QLogic, mainly Pompey S. Nagra, product manager iSCSI HBAs:

Archive of the conversation.

After you have read this page, please send an email to the following people, cite this conversation and request (politely) shipping of the promised hardware. Do not cite any developer names, QLogic very well knows who we are and where they should ship the HBAs to (but do cite my name and the link to the converstation):

Pompey S. Nagra : pompey.nagra@qlogic.com
David Clark: david.clark@qlogic.com
Amit Vashi: amit.vashi@qlogic.com

To continue to gain better hardware support for OpenBSD, we need to be diligent in convincing hardware manufacturers to provide documentation. This also shows that you can help the developers out by doing all this work so they can spend their time writing code instead of arguing and begging for documentation and hardware. Big thanks to Stephan for trying, let's hope we can make it work out in the end.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (96.28.230.179) on

    I am not sure that badgering vendors for free product is as helpful as you think it is.

    Comments
    1. By Daniel Gracia (paladdin) on http://www.cabezonwireless.net

      Perseverance makes progress and, whenever political correctness is there, I think a little persistence is very helpful :)

    2. By Anonymous Coward (82.192.243.246) on

      > I am not sure that badgering vendors for free product is as helpful as you think it is.
      >

      You're right. To maunder around is much more helpful.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (208.146.43.210) on

    First off I commend Stephan's efforts, but I have to play devil's advocate a little here. I don't see anywhere in mail exchange where the actually promised to send hardware. They seemed to suggest that they would revisit the idea once the "supply shortage issue" had been resolved. Also I'd be willing to bet that the unwillingness to return the hardware may have scared them off a little (and/or the NDA).

    Nevertheless that's certainly no excuse for them to ignore Stephan's further requests for updates... pretty childish on their part. Ultimately I'm not surprised that they are not interested in providing hardware. Soliciting donations from users may be the better approach. I'm hoping they will still come through with the docs though.

  3. By Bayu Krisnawan (krisna) krisna@infobsd.org on http://www.infobsd.org

    Great effort Stephan, But given nice/null result(at least we knew qlogic).

    Now We're so happy not using Qlogic hardware on our server base
    because sometimes we use OpenBSD for production server.
    Without support from qlogic impossible for us using that hardware.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (2001:6f8:94d:4:2c0:9fff:fe1a:6a01) on

    Nobody should *EVER* make private correspondence public.

    Doing bad things to achieve good things is a no-go, you know.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (85.232.18.5) on

      > Nobody should *EVER* make private correspondence public.
      >
      > Doing bad things to achieve good things is a no-go, you know.

      Bullshit...

    2. By Anonymous Coward (212.20.215.129) on

      > Nobody should *EVER* make private correspondence public.

      Not *EVER* is a bit rigid, IMO. I've not had the chance to read this particular correspondence, so I cannot comment on whether or not putting this, initially private, discussion out in public was ethically justified or not.

      > Doing bad things to achieve good things is a no-go, you know.

      Yeah, like killing one to save ten. Real bad ;-)

  5. By Anonymous Coward (2a01:348:108:155:20a:e4ff:fe2d:99ee) on

    An update:
    From: "Stephan A. Rickauer"
    Newsgroups: gmane.os.openbsd.misc
    Subject: Re: QLogic lies: now it's up to you
    Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:52:21 +0200
    X-Mailer: Evolution 2.22.1
                     
    "Coincidentally", I have just received an update from QLogic in which
    they emphasize their will to ship us the promised HBAs. Please pause 
    your efforts in sending emails to QLogic for now - it seems it already
    has helped a lot.
    
    I will update you as soon as I hear back from them, which should be end
    of this week.
       
    Thanks guys."

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (216.68.197.23) on

      Hardware as promised, great! Documents as needed?

      A note to any Qlogic people, thanks for allowing opportunites to grow.

      Thanks to OpenBSD developers in their pursuit of quality, must be frusterating waiting for results.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

        > Hardware as promised, great! Documents as needed?
        >
        > A note to any Qlogic people, thanks for allowing opportunites to grow.
        >
        > Thanks to OpenBSD developers in their pursuit of quality, must be frusterating waiting for results.

        If they do, do this, they're only benefiting themselves as well, with absolutely nothing to lose and all the more to gain.

        It's unfortunate that some vendors are too ignorant or blind to see this too - especially the large vendors.

  6. By Joe Price (75.144.71.81) on

    The company I work for has expressed interest in using Qlogic iSCSI equipment. I would like to see support from them. I think this effort may be a little too aggressive in this particular scenario, but again I have not got to read the original correspondence.

  7. By Anonymous Coward (79.73.219.81) on

    Waiting for the FreeBSD devs to chime in on this one now and lick some ass (as usual) to get a blobby driver instead, congrats on making this information publically available by the way!

    WELL DONE!

  8. By Motley Fool (MotleyFool) motleyfool@dieselrepower.org on

    thank you for your efforts.

    I'd like to use my hardware RAID box via an iSCSI connection instead of FC.

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