For awhile now there have been numerous posts about how absolutely horrid trying to do firmware updates via the Lifecycle Controller via ftp.dell.com has become.
The bandwidth or hardware devoted to ftp.dell.com does not remotely seem up to the task, when the site is actually up and you can connect, it seems to take many hours for it to actually download the catalog.
Numerous times I have seen on here, and just now when contacting support, it be suggested to download a bootable ISO that will do all the updates.
Is that the preferred suggested course of action to upgrade Dell hardware currently?
Once a month manually download an iso for each unique piece of hardware you are running?
I was forced to download the one for my new unboxed R730xd , and am astonished how bad it is.
There are 111 potential updates. There is no central logic, or inventory collection.
Each and every updated package is executed sequentially.
Each and every update package , separately does "Collecting Inventory" ( which takes a non trivial amount of time ). If that specific update doesn't apply to your hardware, you get
"This Update package is not compatible with your system configuration"
Even the most basic engineering effort could be made to simplify and streamline this process, this is most bare bones out of the box possible solution that could have been devised.
The Lifecycle controller was sold as an innovative intelligent solution by Dell to completely automate the process, each step applied in the Dell approved order ... The initial marketing spiel used to sell it (the Lifecycle contoller) used the old out dated modes of manually download as an example of what an improvement this would be!
Has the Lifecycle controller method of updating via ftp just fallen out of favor?
Is the current vision/plan to just push out the bare bones ISO ?
Will there be improvements to the infrastructure that back ftp.dell.com?