Who Was The Idiot at HP Who Made This Decision?

I have to deal with a bunch of HP and Compaq products at the office from their LaserJets and Deskjet printers to their Proliant servers as well as a few of their laptops and desktops. One of the ways I’ve found information was generally via Google, which has HPs IT Resource Forums and Business Support Forums indexed very well. The forums have always had a solution for the various problems I’ve had, usually there’s been a forum post with a follow up that linked to an appropriate HP/Compaq support article or download page that will give me what I need.

The problem is that HP, in all their infinite wisdom, decided to restructure their support site, effectively killing all those pages that people in the forums linked to. So pages like this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this (among many others, these are just the ones I could find right now) no longer work. The reality is that Google is much better at finding answers in normal language than HP’s own search engine, and clicking through the tons of various options that HP had to find information is a tedious process. There are just tons of dead links all over HP’s site. Whoever the moron was at HP who decided it was a good idea to kill a ton of should-be-permanent links should lose their job.

But for my future reference, since I’ve been dealing with these a lot lately:

• Proliant SmartStart 5.50 ISO. That’s the version you want if you’re planning on doing any work on older PII/PIII Proliant servers (like the ML370, DL360 or DL380 first generations, or any of the 800 or 1600 line). Newer versions don’t support those older machines. If you’re lucky enough to have a newer machine, newer versions can be found here, with 7.80 direct download here.
• Firmware Maintence CDs. 8.2 is here with 7.40b here (the 7.40b is the latest one that will work with most first-generation servers).
• Using HP System Management Software on a CentOS machine (installing diag utilities).
• My question/response re: what the Smart Array Controller can/can’t do.

I’ll add more bookmarks to this as I find them or remember them.

(Update: Fixed link for 7.80 ISO.)