This should NOT be in $10K Dell switches... or a HPE supercomputer

hey guys this is patrick from sth and this is a 10 plus thousand dollar dell switch you can see the label on this switch that says american mega trans t-r-a-n-d-s but it's supposed to say american mega trends because that's the company name which is t-r-e-n-d-s this is a huge supply chain story and we're gonna walk through it on youtube now before we get too far in this let's just say number one that dell and american megatrends have confirmed this being a thing we also know or we have reason to believe that it might actually be in an hpe cray supercomputer sold to the us military we're gonna get to that a little bit later we weren't able to confirm that for this video but we do have uh some kind of anecdotal evidence that kind of suggests that but the implication is that because we do have an official acknowledgement of this we have to stick to the official story so we can tell you about the process that i went through to go and figure this whole thing out that this affects an entire line of very high-end dell switches we can talk about the official statements i can give some opportunities for improvement or things that i think is my opinion that could be improved in the process and you know if you want to go anywhere beyond that well the only thing i could tell you is that you're probably going to want to go and talk about this in the comments section i think this one might actually have a little bit livelier of a comment section than our normal videos because um there's a lot here so why don't we get into it now at sdh we do a lot of very technical articles and this one we don't really need to get into the weeds in terms of technical stuff but we do need to just explain what one thing is because what does american mega trends i mean why is mega trans why is that sticker there what the heck is it so the first thing that you need to know is what's called a baseboard magic controller and we do have a guide on this on the sdh main set we'll link that in the description we're gonna be referencing stuff throughout this video you can go check those things out in the description of this video but what a baseboard management controller basically is is you can think of it like a little computer that sits inside switches servers storage gear and all kinds of gear out there and what that basically does is it does things like monitors you can issue commands you can do all kinds of stuff so you don't actually have to physically go and service components in the field it's expensive to go send someone down into a data center and then have to go and plug into a machine make sure you have the right machine it's just a total pain and the only way that humanity can actually scale is compute infrastructure is if we have some way to monitor and manage systems remotely now large vendors like hpe and dell have their own proprietary baseboard management controllers with their own software stack hpe for example uses ilo but dell uses idrac and so we always talk about the idrac controller when we do a poweredge review that's a really good example and you have that nice little web management page you have all kinds of stuff in it and while some vendors have their own silicon but most people do and most vendors and most hyperscalers and all those guys do is they actually just go use an off-the-shelf baseboard management controller and the big one there is usually an a-speed controller so something like the ast 2500 2600 for servers there are lower end versions for things like switches and stuff like that and all different features but basically it is an out of band tool to be able to manage a box that's sitting in a data center or somewhere else remotely without having to go touch it now i mentioned that it's kind of like a little computer and that's important because of course as a computer you kind of need like an operating system and you kind of need like programs and like all that kind of stuff right and that's really what american megatrends provides to the industry they're awesome i mean they have absolutely great products we use them all the time and you know you might use on a server something like their mega rack spx but in a switch you tend to have less compute resources and so that's why you would use something a little bit lower end maybe like a mega rack pm so when you see this sticker and the stickers that we're going to talk about in this video the easy way to think about it in terms of analogy is like if you have a laptop and since i just happen to have one here we're going to use this instead but this is a little tiny mini micro node and you'll see that we have a microsoft windows sticker well that's basically what these stickers are from american megatrends they're basically license or royalty stickers the difference though is that it would be like if this said instead of microsoft windows it said macrosoft windows that's basically what we're looking at here so now that you understand that that's all the technical knowledge that you need to understand what the heck is going on here this is nowhere near something like when bloomberg was talking about spy chips that were allegedly out there but nobody's actually found in the wild yet uh it's not like that it's actually very easy to see it's plain to see anybody can see it and it is on the same component that bloomberg was talking about in their 2018 piece by the way if you didn't know i actually was the one that did the follow-up interview with yossi applebaum who is basically their cited source for their second article because you know they had a second article a couple days after the big one and i actually interviewed him and he basically was pretty angry at what bloomberg did and so you can read that we'll link that on description but if you still think that bloomberg story is real um just go read that interview and i think you'll totally get it but this is a lot more concrete but apparently it's not really an issue so let's get into what happened and then we'll get into what's going on here all right so let's go back to august of 2021. towards the end of august i said hey you know i think we should go do more networking reviews we've done some 100 gig 400 gig switch reviews and these are very high-end very expensive switches and i kind of like it not a lot of people do those and i said you know we should just go and make this a specialty that we're gonna do more of on sth and i was talking to someone at dell at the end of august or so about like you know we're just kind of talking about doing reviews and stuff like that and i was told that someone at dell you know they were evaluating sites and stuff and one of the questions they came up with was like you know why sth now for content here sth is the largest editorially independent server storage networking review site in the world everybody else you can pay and they will go post you know whatever vendor words you want on their website or they'll say like you can write it but we want to review it before it goes live everything that we do is done editorially independently on sdh that is a hallmark and because we do that we actually have a big readership where youtube is still kind of small and it's still like single digit percentage of the main site but the main site is very large and actually larger than some of the consumer sites that i've looked up to over the years at this point because we are very good at focusing in that space so even though i knew the answer and i knew kind of like why they were doing that i'm still an a-type personality so i said okay heck with this i'm gonna go prove to them and show them exactly why sth and since i was thinking networking at the time that we did this i said okay well let's go get some dell switches i'll just go buy them and then we'll go review them and i'll show dell our impact it'd be very clear to them the fact that we have impact so on september 5th i purchased three different models now the first model of course was the dell f-o-n and we did a review of that we even had a video of that which you can find online we'll go and we'll you know link that in the description but that was the first one that we did and dell did something a little bit different in that switch if you want to go watch it go ahead but we still wanted to kind of get back and do a couple more switches and so we bought some other ones that i thought were interesting as well one of those was the dell s 5232 fo n which is a 32 port 100 gigabit ethernet switch incredibly awesome and fast switch and that was the next one that we did a review of and so we published a review on the sdh main site and we did a video of that one as well but youtube had something special in store for us specifically we got a comment that basically said american megatrans on the bmc what is that and i remember reading that comment and thinking like hey what is this guy talking about and so i went and i said okay let me go look at the photos and see and we had done not just the s5232 fon which is the 32 port 100 gig switch we also did the s 52 96 fo n which is like a giant hundred plus port switch uh we did that basically the same time because we do batch things like that totally happened and so i had photos from both and we had b-roll from both and i looked and i said well let me go look and see if it really says mega trans so i looked at the photos and sure enough both of these still photos for both of the switches they said american mega trans t-r-a-n-d-s not trends t-r-e-n-d-s and i thought to myself okay well sure we have this you know giant canon r5 and you know fancy lenses and stuff and maybe that's just an optical illusion so i remember that we did the b-roll on a sony camera so i said okay let's go look at the sony camera and see if you know sony also had that same optical illusion and it turned out that they did it was mega trans not trends so to get a third perspective i actually walked to the studio and i said okay let me go look in there and see if i can just open these things up and if they actually say mega trans and guess what it did both of them did actually and that is totally interesting right because i looked at it rohit looked at it probably whoever you know made the switches looked at this we also had tens of thousands of people watch that video tens of thousands or however many people went and actually read the article and nobody noticed this other than one commenter on youtube and that i thought was just amazing that they managed to find this so later that day i actually just took the little photo and i put it on twitter and everybody was like whoa what what is megatrans because it's megatrends and american megatrends is very well known in the industry so this was totally weird also on october 4th i actually sent a note in to the american mega trends and i went on the website found their legal form and i said hey um i just opened these switches and they say american mega trans t-r-a-n-d-s not american mega trends t-r-e-n-d-s and i've also spent a little bit of time looking through some of our old photos on sth because you know we have like a library of just giant photos i mean more that get published on the main site and i was like i've seen it on some other vendors as well like is this is do you know about this like what the heck's going on now i didn't get a note back on the fourth because it's already kind of late in the day by the time i had sent that but i did get a response on the fifth and the response that i got from american megatrans headquarters in georgia was not like oh yeah we know about this this is you know just a thing somebody to type up hey i make titles all the time sure but they said uh we need to do a little bit more investigation i'm not gonna go into the entire conversation because i said i wouldn't but just suffice to say on october 5th i did not come away from that conversation saying like okay these guys definitely know what the heck is going on and so i told dell and i said like hey dell uh i think i found something uh that i'm investigating i think i may have found some hardware issue uh you know it's in these switches like i i don't know what to tell you and one of the things that the dell guys actually came back and was actually really insightful was like hey well how do you know that the units that you purchased how do you know that it wasn't like a reseller rogue reseller that had swapped some hardware or something like that and i thought like oh well i hadn't thought about that that's a good point i bought these all from one reseller could have just been a rogue reseller that made these little boards and put them together and put them in the switch that nobody would ever see or care about so that's totally possible so that's why on october 7th i was thinking about well how do we go and figure out like you know a way to know that it's not just a road reseller and that's why i actually went and purchased two more switches now because the first reseller was in the southeast us i said okay well let me go publish or purchase it from a different reseller in maybe like the midwest or something like that and so we actually got the dell s5248 fo n which is like a 48 port switch and we got that from another reseller in the us but then i said okay well maybe it's the u.s supply chain and so what if i went and got an international unit and so i decided to go and get the less expensive one because you're shipping things internationally and it costs a lot of money so we got a dell s 52 24 fo n that came from an international seller and so i knew that we had you know four different models of these switches they were from three different resellers and two different countries so clearly if all of these had the same board then we knew that it's probably something upstream and not just a rogue reseller so the following week was an event for dell which is dell technology summit and during that week we actually got the other switches and the both of the switches of course had american mega trans not american mega trends as well so it seems like it is just a feature of all of these switches in the dell s5200 line again a very high-end switch line which seems kind of weird at the same point all the dell folks you know they had michael dell they had everybody on this dell technology summit thing so everybody's really focused on that and i said okay here's the deal i'm gonna give you 24 hours to go figure out what's going on dell but we're not gonna do it this week because you're not gonna have bandwidth to go do it and i don't wanna ruin your event instead let's do it the following week i'm gonna give you we're gonna have lunch i'm gonna show you the evidence and then you're gonna have 24 hours to get back to me otherwise pieces go online so the lunch meeting was set for october 19th and when i walked into that meeting i had not heard anything from the american mega trans headquarters all the last thing i think i heard was like on october 5th or something like that where they said like hey yeah you know we're doing some investigation so they had like two weeks hadn't heard anything and i'm walking into this meeting with dell just to kind of set the stage so on october 19th after lunch i hadn't heard anything i basically pulled out the ipad and i said look here's the one that you can find which is the s 52 32 f o n and you can find that on youtube you can go see this stuff so your people probably have already seen it but that's uh that's out there and then also here is the s 52 96 f o n and this is one that we haven't published yet but you know certainly this has the same thing here's also the s 5248 fo n same thing and here's the s 5224 f o n again same thing and as you know i don't do these with the script so that is a bit of a tongue twister just to remember and get out but before that lunch meeting and at when i'm showing this off i said look del you have 24 hours to get back to me with like what the heck is going on otherwise i'm just gonna go release the story because you know i have four switches i have enough evidence and any anybody can see that this does not say american megatrends it says american megatrans now they asked why 24 hours and i didn't exactly tell them but my reasoning for 24 hours was really simple i figured if dell actually knew about this then they would already have documentation and it would be a relatively simple exercise to say look we knew about this here's the documentation some executive is probably gonna have to go you know bless it and say okay it's okay to go disclose this but we know about it and then once i get that i can't say like uh this does not look right i used to do big firm consulting so i definitely knew that if something is in the fast path and you already have that kind of stuff you can usually get those things out no problem in an afternoon if not by the next day so it should not be an issue if somebody already knew what was going on however i've also worked with really big companies on complex issues like this and something that you know if you've ever done that is that stuff doesn't happen in 24 hours because you have to go talk to so many people that are online at different times and stuff like that it's just a nature of being a big company so my thought was that if i got an answer within 24 hours or somebody came back to me and said like hey we already know what's going on that afternoon i would know that they knew about this and if it went longer than 24 hours i knew that they would have had to go do like an investigation create documentation on it and then you know bless the answer send it out and that would take over 24 hours so they would not be able to get back to me so that was really the you know kind of other reason that i was doing this 24-hour thing again given the fact that i knew that vmware was going to spin off on november 1st it would have looked really really bad if you know dell technologies and vmware were selling a joint solution where they had a not valid license sticker uh being sold as part of that solution because if you know you sell software it's not really good to go and have not licensed or not properly licensed software of your competitors or suppliers in your solution right so like i was pretty sure that i would get a pretty fast response if there was at least you know something around that and of course for anybody that says hey you should have just published this because that would have been wildfire if you had done it you shouldn't have waited this long you shouldn't have talked to dell about it like come on guys like i don't want to do this stuff at all this is not what we do at sdh we do hands-on reviews so frankly you know i'm gonna go work with them on it and say like hey i don't wanna i don't wanna pull this out of nowhere on you and you wake up and read it in the morning i want you to know what's going on and have an opportunity to say like hey actually we knew about this this is what's going on so of course by the afternoon of october 19th after lunch i did get a response from them but it was not like oh we know about this actually they were like hey we want to know what resellers you bought this from and my response to them was like hey um you know four different platforms four different switches and different models three different resellers two different countries this is an upstream supply chain issue and in fact there's an easy way that you can go validate this because it's probably on all of them and when i was like 16 years old i taught tennis but then i also had another job and that job was basically i worked in a cisco factory in the rma department so i know that at networking vendors there are rma departments and that they have tons of boards and switches just kind of sitting around as they're in that rma process and because of that i said well why don't you just go call up your rma guys and say like hey can somebody go or just have somebody have one of these things open because most likely they're going to see a mega trans sticker in there as well given what we found you should not be looking at me this afternoon you should be going and looking at you know what's upstream and try figuring that out now i was flying on the morning of october 20th but i did get a ping before i got on plane saying hey uh actually american megatrends they say it's a typo we're gonna get something to you at some point and so i said yeah i'll hold the story because i knew i was gonna hold the story and that this call was gonna come anyway but you know i said yep no problem i'll go i'll go hold that no big deal and again i make plenty of typos so this is totally possible now on october 21st i actually got a response from ami finally and instead of reading it out i'm gonna just put it up here but they basically acknowledge the fact that there is a typo and he also says there's no legal issues so like you would be like pirating software if you had one of these labels and they finally said we're going to continue to use this label which i thought was crazy but we're going to continue to use this label at some point later american megatrends out of their taiwan office actually had sent a letter it's an affirmation letter and they sent that to another party that's redacted as well as dell and they basically said same thing you know no legal consequence it's a typo and that label is with the typo is still going to be implemented and shipped by ami again remember this is the equivalent of macrosoft windows and microsoft just saying yeah whatever we're just going to keep shipping it now a couple of things with this if you want to read it more we'll have it on the sth main site but a couple things with this first off there are some redacted portions my guess is that that's probably the odm we don't know because it's redacted but dell doesn't you know usually manufacture these switches there's usually an odm so there's usually some other party that goes and will go put all the stuff together they'll get these labels put them on and then it goes to dell dell sells it as their own of course we don't know who that is so that's just a little bit of speculation it could say anything under the redaction okay so at this point what we basically got to by the 21st 22nd of october was the point that we could say that yep windows stickers they're fine just like we can have mega trans now other things in this affirmation letter that you're going to notice is that they're actually using one of our photos and so and it's also dated the 21st of october so what is important here is the date because this is after one i brought it and way after i brought it to ami two it's kind of you know after i brought it to dell as well so this is not something that they had you know sitting around and they just kind of redacted a little bit and sent out to me instead this is something that they made specifically in a response to what i had sent and let's kind of go through what must have happened based on just the events and what we saw in terms of you know what feedback we got from the companies and again i know there are probably some people that are not going to believe that this is the official story but this is literally what we have i did have people when i was kind of showing this beforehand saying like oh well those are clearly counterfeit stickers and just trying to cover it up but i don't believe that could be the case i mean you know that was just the comments that i got from you know some folks that i brought it to you so again i don't think that's possible i doubt you would but you would probably tell me in the comments section if you thought that was possible instead let's kind of go through the chain of like what would have to go wrong for this to actually be the case and let's just kind of go through that real quick so i guess what would happen is that ami in taiwan needed to have local license stickers and so instead of just going saying like hey can we use that 2003 sticker template right because it says copyright 2003. instead of using that old template what if instead what if we just made our own and we're just going to make it look kind of the same but we're not going to use the template that we already have and in that process they managed to misspell their company name and at that point they would have had to go print out the stickers they would have had to not notice that the stickers were misspelled or they were you know basically looking at the sticker seeing that they were misspelled and saying you know what whatever those stickers would have to go to the odm and the odm that makes those switches for dell would have to have accepted either you know the pcb with those switches or those stickers already attached or you know they would have had to put them together themselves and they would have had to say okay i know that i got this from american mega trends but it says american mega trans and so yeah no big deal sure the names don't match but what's the difference between getting windows and windows anyway now after the odm actually built a switch they sent them to dell and dell would have had to do their supply chain diligence so they would probably look at that and say hey you know either a they didn't see it or b they said yeah it's fine no big deal what we do know though is that there wasn't like documentation or didn't seem to be any documentation made because this was not widely known the u.s office of american megatrends had no idea about this when i had asked them and then also dell it took him a long time to get the answer so they obviously had to go do some investigation even though i had already given american mega trends the heads up like over two weeks earlier that hey i found this thing in dell switches but these switches are also 2019 switches so for me to find it and for nobody have any idea about this that also means that it would have to go through like the dell rma departments and like all those kind of things like everybody else anybody else that could have seen an open switch would have probably missed it now i can totally understand that because like i missed it rohit messed up me everybody seems to have missed this because it looks so close that you just don't read it and the other thing that's important is that the letter the affirmation letter from ami did not reference another you know artifact right there was nothing that said in that letter that was brand new somebody said like hey as we told you in 2019 this is fine instead it's just all new stuff and so we don't know what it says under the redaction but it does seem to say like you know if this really was a thing and everybody knew about it they would have said like oh yeah uh remember that that note that we sent you like two years ago that's what's going on here and the other thing is that these stickers that don't say the right company name are going to continue to be sold which is um really kind of interesting isn't it so now that we've gone through you know what the timeline what the process was that we gathered this information and just kind of talked about that i think we can start talking about what i think might be some process improvements now first off dell is widely regarded in the industry as having excellent supply chain but clearly it seems like something could be a little bit better here i mean when the original bloomberg supply chain article came out there were literally people that like you know took their servers or super micro servers and they would go and like you know have them x-rayed they didn't find anything right but they were so freaked out like that happened and they're literally getting them x-rayed but then you know this is something that literally anybody can open this up and see that there's a mis there's something weird about the sticker and nobody's talked about it for two years this was literally one of you a youtube commenter that figured out that there was something weird about this sticker it wasn't dell it wasn't the sth team it wasn't anybody else it was somebody on youtube and it feels like if it's something that's easy enough for somebody to catch on youtube then dell since they are supposed to have a very tight supply chain and very good supply chain security this is something that just kind of feels like they should have caught earlier in the process i mean the odm could have said hey american megatrends no we wanted to say american megatrends not american megatrans dell could have said no you know we don't want it to say american mega trans we want to say american mega trends you think about if you went into a louis vuitton store you bought a louis vuitton bag and it came out and it said hey this is a louis vuitton you'd probably say like uh yeah except i want the louis vuitton bag not a louis vuitton bag so uh let me let me get the real one not this thing and that didn't happen here so i think that's definitely an area for improvement the other thing though is that these stickers are continuing to ship i mean that makes it really hard if somebody were to go out and make an american mega trans sticker that would make it really difficult for somebody to go and be able to tell if they had a legitimate royalty sticker or if they had you know a pirated or a counterfeit royalty sticker right because it doesn't say american megatrends and also i do think that the dell folks did do a good job of getting back to me and actually hunting this thing down i know probably led to some sleepless nights for folks so i'm sorry but at the same time at least we do have an answer and we have the official answer on what the heck is going on here now because i had done some research and i kind of saw something from hpe i had given them the same opportunity hpe on the other hand did not run it down so this is probably going to be the first time that they're going to hear about this this all goes back to some photos that i just kind of was looking through at super computing 2018. there hpe and cray so hpe purchased cray and as part of that they had their new systems they had these giant booths it was super cool it was a great time and if you didn't see it we just did a liquid cooling and also top 10 of super computing 21 so you can definitely go check those out on youtube we'll again link those in the description however when we went to the hpe booth we took apparently a picture and this picture says this is a cray cs 500 and for those that don't know what 2u 4 node servers are they basically are two u boxes and there are four dual socket nodes so you can get a total of eight processors and all their memory stuffed into a tv box which is means that you get a lot of density and that's what the high performance computers want like super computers that's kind of a model that those folks use and that's exactly what this box is and that's this photo now typically you wouldn't find mega rack pm on a like server node so you wouldn't normally see it in the system however this particular one was based on an odm design and in the corner you can actually see that there is a chassis management controller and the idea there is basically instead of having like four different network ports one for each of the different nodes you just have one port and then manage everything all centrally off of one port it saves cabling it's just kind of a nice feature but typically for that you use a lower end a speed bmc and that also might be something that you'd use mega rack pm for and when i looked at photos of the chassis management controller it of course said american mega trans so they did a little bit of research and i said okay well nobody actually used the cs500 right but i was wrong so i went on the top 500 list which is the top 500 supercomputers in the world and something that we saw was that the you know hpe cray system was based on the cs 500 went into a system called freeman now freeman debuted at number 123 on that top 500 list in june of 2020. on the november 2021 list that just came out it's down to like 185 or something like that so it's definitely down a little bit but it's still definitely a top 200 super computer now usually the super computers have you know where they're installed and this one had an interesting one because it said e-r-d-c d-s-r-c and there you can see that it's in vicksburg but there's also a website and while you might not be familiar with the entire url what you might notice is that it says army.mill so of course i clicked on the link and what did i find but i was at the u.s army corps of engineers engineer research and development center so that's erdc so we don't know about this hp systems we actually don't know if the system that we saw on the show floor at super computing 2018 is the same thing that got installed with the us military we don't know that right because they could have not put that chassis management controller they could have said hey actually we want we want the american mega trends not trans stickers so of course when hpe did their supply chain checks they probably would have seen that but at the same time i know we have a lot of readers in the washington dc virginia maryland area and so what i would say is if you do happen to work on freeman or you know somebody that does it might be worth sending this article and saying hey maybe you should go take five minutes open up a node and just double check because if you do see american mega trans you're probably going to want to go call up hpe and say hey guys what's going on make sure you get that affirmation letter so that way you can be sure that your royalty stickers are actually genuine and they're not some kind of something else all right so just kind of let's kind of get some takeaways so first thing i think is a challenge is just just number one like it's crazy the fact that one of you on youtube figured out the fact that this thing is not right everybody else in the supply chain apparently didn't notice this but somebody on youtube actually figured this out that was the first time somebody figured this out so congratulations but at the same time because it says mega trans not mega trends and american megatrends is not like reprinting these things well i mean how would you know now if you had a royalty sticker that was a counterfeit or a genuine one it would be like really hard to figure that out and so that's kind of a weird thing but of course if you knew that you know for two plus years you'd been selling these stickers with these typos in it you would probably say like hey if somebody goes and looks at the sticker later and they're doing research they're probably going to go type in americanmegatrans.com or maybe there would be a hyphen and they would do americanmegatrans.com and maybe they would look up that and so we should probably go register the domain name so that way somebody nefarious doesn't go and pick up that domain name and redirect them to some site so it just so happens on october 22nd somebody did have that idea okay so this clearly is not the industry's finest moment we all know that let's just call it what it is now if there's nothing else that you take from this just know that supply chain security is a big deal remember these are very high end 10 plus thousand dollar switches i mean these things are very expensive and you know if something that you can see with the naked eye very easily can go and pass all these different steps and not get detected until you know somebody on youtube literally finds it well you know what about the kind of cheaper devices that kind of makes you a little bit nervous right like i mean what about those 500 boxes thousand dollar boxes i mean that kind of gets you a little bit nervous and that's why supply chain security is so important so if there's nothing else that you take from this video that should be the key takeaway now again i mentioned a whole bunch of things that are going to be linked in the description so definitely go check that out feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think about this and as always if you like this video why don't you give it a like click subscribe turn on notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 22,805

Keywords: hpe, cray, dell, dell emc, dell emc networking, cray cs500, us army, supercomputer, hpe supercomputer, megatrands, megatrends, american megatrends, american megatrands, supply chain, supply chain issues, supply chain security, dell supply chain security, hpe supply chain security, servethehome, serve the home, dell s5248f-on, dell s5232f-on, dell s5296f-on, dell s5224f-on, network switch, hewlett packard enterprise

Id: dUVmDcv782k

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/InvincibleBird]

Article on servethehome.com.

[u/Verite_Rendition]

For everyone saying this is no big deal, I think you all need to read (or re-read) the story a bit closer. Serve The Home is all but explicitly stating that Dell is shipping switches that are using bootlegged software.

In this article, we are not going to entertain the potential that someone was selling counterfeit stickers to save a bit of cost and this was swept up. That came up in numerous conversations I had with folks about this and showing them the stickers, but that is not the official version, so we will not entertain that here.

The MegaRAC stickers have a typo because they're bootleg stickers; they're designed to look close enough to the real thing to pass a cursory inspection without actually infringing upon AMI's name/trademark. And bootleg stickers are needed because Dell's ODM is using unlicensed/counterfeit copies of AMI software for the BMC. As STH insinuates, presumably, someone at the ODM decided to go with counterfeit software to save on costs, and they were getting away with it for years.

I mean really, AMI and Dell's cover story is that they misprinted the stickers for years? And that they are going to continue shipping them for years to come? That's an utter bollocks explanation. Dell and AMI are clearly covering their butts here; Dell because their ODM snookered them, and AMI because the last thing they need is a primo customer like Dell getting in trouble.

I don't know why STH is trying to dance around the issue by not stating anything directly. But regardless, this is a very big deal. Dell is shipping switches with bootleg components. And if they couldn't even catch a typo on a sticker, how many other components in how many other products are also counterfeit? Or worse, compromised?

[u/froop]

Tl;dw, it's just a typo, nothing exciting.