Originally Posted by oil_film_movies
Understood that normally an entire board gets thrown away if diagnostics has a problem, fine, modular stuff.
In this particular case, there could be a circuit board mod you could make to restore the board to the original Silicon Valley design.
Remember, the Chinese spy agency created this add-on device, and depending on if it's wired in parallel or not, or can have it's power wire severed, a work procedure can return the board to normal operation.
Without removing thousands of servers. ... Whatever is cheaper really. Sounds like they put this on the cache memory lines with power & a serial port hook-up, or something similar.
It would be hard to sue SuperMicro I suppose, although they are ultimately responsible for not sampling and inspecting any stuff made in a hostile Chinese country.
No hardware conformance inspections done state-side? Sloppy. I guess that's normal for consumer-quality devices though. I'm accustomed to aerospace quality, which does get inspected if a supplier is not quite trusted.
Typically, servers are not installed one by one on a rack at customer site, you buy them from one contract manufacturer, tell them to send to the next, install it in a rack, run your test, then send the whole rack to your data center, then another contractor bolt it down wire it up etc. They are tested, you as a customer tell them to run your test, but you never tear down things to check if the test past. This is not transportation safety cutting tire to inspect, they are just equipment, that will die as a percentage in normal use, and typically a data center have 1.5% of its capacity down anyways.
No one get a security clearance to go into a data center to de solder a chip to save a few hundred bucks. That board (or SSD drive, or hard drive, etc) gets thrown away and warranty claimed filed, vendor paid for. IF THIS ARTICLE IS TRUE, this board gets thrown away, customer not satisfied but not warranty claim filed, they'll eat the cost (what is a few hundred bucks vs $10B a year in equipment anyways, AWS spend $1B in flash memory alone each year).
Just woke up today and realized this: they are probably talking about a SPI interface (boot rom, EFI BIOS, etc), and some "security expert" realized it is an article material talking about a SPY chip and now the whole world is on super micro's butt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Peripheral_Interface
Yup, SPI, that thing you use to connect boot chip, SMBus, Bios, BMC, whatever you call it. Perfecto, we have an article.