"it's hard to believe that anything but a very small minority of shops would need to support floppy discs on Proliant servers"

The author obviously isn't familiar with installing windows - the damn thing still needs a floppy drive to load the poxy additional RAID controller drivers. In theory it ought to be possible to stuff them on an additional CD (which doesn't often work) or slipstream them onto a customised copy of the windows media (thereby violating whatever terms MS write on the discs themselves).

Welcome to the 21st century - the FDD is alive and well, thank you!

Try nLite - www.nliteos.com. Only supports up to w2k3, but nobody should be running a server on vista (or anything else with less than a couple of service packs behind it) anyway. I discovered it a couple of weeks back when I wanted to install a new SATA/RAID box from scratch and found my old floppy drive didn't work any more - even though I was using w2k from before there even /was/ SATA, everything worked perfectly. It makes slipstreaming your drivers trivially simple - throw away your FDD!

HP servers come with a so called Essentials CD which takes care of the installation by preparing the partition, loading the OS files, installing the OS, installing the drivers, etc. You really don't need a floppy to install Windows on these.

Shocking that a known virus should have come from a factory system, even if it is internal only - don't they have auto-update on their factory LAN for their anti-virus? Both of these virii seem to be old enough to have long since been included in AV updates. We check all such USB keys before they get allowed on the production systems, but I suppose small shops could be caught out.

Nick Ryan obviously isn't familiar with HP servers. You would use SmartStart which stuffs a load of drivers on the disk, and then integrates them with the Windows installer.

Of course, you'd probably have a customised image pre-built already that you simply use Ghost or somesuch with.

sorry bout the previous one :)

"Secondly, it's hard to believe that anything but a very small minority of shops would need to support floppy discs on Proliant servers, thereby risking exposure."

probably meant that only very few customer would install an OS that require floppy on a server.

My two pennies

In my experience, it's only the very low-end boxes with the integrated SATA controllers that need the extra drivers - the SAS & SCSI boxes all install quite happily from SmartStart. That's not to say they aren't still quite common, of course, but the lion's share of the market is taken by DL380 & ML370.

None of this excuses sending out infected drives, mind!

Funny that you mention HP and USB memory stick in the same sentence. I had the dubious pleasure of having to install some software on HP workstations the last couple of weeks. Oddly enough, when I plug a USB stick in, nothing happens. Turns out the machines are delivered with all the drive names D through N taken up by useless crap.

Things got worse after they sacked Fiona.

Their plotterdrivers are a disgrace, wearing their Vista decorations with pride, but not living up to it (they don't run under XP either).

Their website is even worse.

Are they trying to underperform M$?

What in God's sweet name are you talking about man?

I for one welcome our new USB overlords~!

1) it's typical Apple production QC, and 2) A way to further sabotage competitors in the server business since NO ONE is buying X Servers.

Didn't this happen to someone's Hard Drives made in China in the last year or so? A case of here we go again?

What are these things you speak of ??

I think he meant "X" number of servers!!!

I see you're still here - shame....

Can't resist a quick dig at Apple again, good to see you're still on form though, keeping us all "entertained" (or is that bored rigid?)

For someone wanting to spread a trojan, start a botnet etc...

Buy a pile of USB sticks on the cheap, load em up with the malware, and sell them even cheaper on FleaBay... make a bit of a loss but if, as many of them are, they're doing it for a profit in the long run, then it's just an investment.

Just put some nice 'demo' files on the sticks...

Truly random and bizarre as always.

Perhaps you and Morely Dotes should start up a blog together, or maybe a militia?

Easier than that. Just put a file on them referenced by autorun.inf which is called "DriverInstall.exe", purports to be installing drivers for the USB stick (most numpties don't know they're not required) and most people will happily wave it past UAC or XP's warning messages.