Or, watch them roll their eyes since the dongle enables sole-source software to operate a large, complex piece of specialized hardware, a system which is ballast without the manufacturer's software.
Well you've found your problem right there: Single sourced.
We see that garbage for our print shop. The printing industry is full of that crud.
We isolate those machines from the rest of the network on their own VLAN and tell the print shop that all required upgrades and maintenance should be purchased on a service contract for the entire server, hardware and all, leave the dongle in the back of it, and add the caveat if the system becomes a security problem for our certifications, we'll yank the network connection out of it until it's fixed by the vendor.
(Because sole source vendors usually don't put out timely updates for either the OS nor the software and cover their asses by saying the machine should never be on a public network or a private one with anything important on it -- check the fine print, it's nearly boilerplate in that world.)
Which is also why our print shop has their own VLAN. The printing software manufacturers love installing full blown copies of Linux servers with wide open root privs, and also seem to have a love for Windows XP Embedded.
One particularly heinous vendor has so many security holes in their server we home-ran a cable from the print shop to the server directly and made it a point to point LAN to keep it the hell away from everything else. The only way to even access it is from the single machine that has that extra Ethernet port on it. This has the side benefit of uptime, since that machine controls one of those multi-million dollar devices, and cutting it off from its mama-server leads to recalibration and other expensive time-wasting stuff. A point to point cable never goes down unless the client PC that needs the server is rebooted.
This same vendor told us when they forced a hardware upgrade on us, and I'm not kidding... That we couldn't use a Dell server to match our other gear and had to buy their certified HP machine... Or pay $5000 to... "Send your server to our PhD who works from his house in Florida for certification."
"So no one else has ever done that? Do you have a list of certified Dells?"
"No, each server must be shipped and certified. He has to do a software load specific to the hardware."
"Um, last I checked it's just a really ancient copy of SuSE and here, let me send you a document from their website showing they support this specific Dell hardware."
"Well... You still have to ship the server."
"Ok send me a quote on your hardware. This is ridiculous crap, you know."
[quote arrives, at the next meeting...]
"You're trying to get me to pay more than full retail price for an HP server that's already end of lifed by HP!"
"Oh um... End of lifed?"
"Yeah let me email you the link. For that price we would expect your server to at least be a Gen 9!"
"I don't think the PhD has certified those yet..."
"They've been out for a couple of years. Maybe he better get on it. Or just approve our Dell."
"We'll get back to you."
[third meeting. Remember they started this by saying we couldn't run their software on the old server anymore because they wouldn't sign a support contract on it anymore.]
"So you can provide a Gen 9. I noticed the price is now at a point where we would just barely be better off shipping our Dell to the PhD's house and we'd end up with better hardware and RAID 5 and a lot more disk space and RAM."
"Ummmm. What do you mean?"
"Here let me send you Dell's quote without our corporate discount and you'll see the specs are better overall, better CPU, larger drives, and much more RAM, and there's plenty of margin to have the Doc do whatever magic he thinks loading SuSE Linux on it will require. Man I want that guy's gig. What a racket!"
"We'll get back to you..."
[meeting number four...]
"We can give you special pricing on the newly certified Gen 9 with all of your specs matching what you could get in your Dell."
"Hey cool. So this is the price in my email here?"
"Yeah."
"Well it's $2,000 above the Dell still, but this hardware is fully certified by you guys and we never have to touch it? This price includes on-site 24 hour repair and replacement if anything fails?"
"Yep. We had to pull a lot of strings to get that price."
"I'll send my recommendation to management that they sign. They'll get back with you hopefully sometime this week."
Four weeks of one hour meetings to save the company $20,000. That's right. They wanted $20,000 more dollars for an end of lifed "certified" HP. I figured $5000/hr in savings was worth the four hours to mess with these damned single source vendors.
I still could have done it $2000 cheaper on the Dell, but they threw in on-site repair and all parts for five years after I was done with them.
Vendors slowly learn to never ever call me to tell me you're forcing me to upgrade something that's working. It ****es me off and I will make you give me something for it, or recommend we find another vendor for the next "big proprietary machine/system" purchase.
I feel bad for the shops that can't call them on their BS. A Doctor in Florida in his house to load SuSE on a server... YGBFKM. We aren't even a SuSE shop and I know better than that.
A USB short extension and some Velcro to get their dongle strapped to the back of their silly "approved" server so it wouldn't foul itself on the cable management arm worked fine.
I paid that $4 out of the $20,000 I saved, by telling them they were full of ****.
Rant about proprietary garbage software and systems, now over. Haha.
"Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script..."
Anyway, I wish the OP luck. The extension and Velcro thing works fine. No need to install anything inside the box with a header cable and when a power outage or blown power supply eventually corrupts the USB stick, you can just pull it and drop it in FedEx to the vendor to fix it.
Secondarily, I recommend firing up "dd" on a Linux box or Mac and copying the dongle bit by bit so while the vendor thinks you're waiting for their fixed one to come back, you already have the server back online with another identically sized dongle.
Tricks of the trade. It's not an illegal copy of their dumb dongle, it's a backup. Test it once, label it, and lock it in your desk drawer with the other software licenses.
If you can't get it to work and they've done something really tricky to the dongle, make them send you a spare. If they balk, ask them how they will get you a new one inside of four hours per the service contract for on-site repairs.
You set the standard for your uptime requirements for the business and make them perform. Even if you're stuck with their junk.
