[TriLUG] "The Linux Experience" at Dell, a tale of woe and wow. VERY LONG

[Rory Savage]

William,

	I remember the Dell problems we used to have at Nando.   Honestly,
I don't remember that situation playing out like that.   I think it  
was just the
raid support guys who said they weren't supporting Linux.   I think  
at that
time the bulk of their OS diagnostics tools only ran in Windows.  I  
could
be wrong, but that's how I remember it.   (It's been years).
	I remember the constant problems with the RAID cards, and I could
have sworn that after numerous communications between myself,
Joe Overocker and others, Dell finally issued a revision of the RAID  
card,
and we started re-placing some with them.
	I remember one time a Dell technician came out on site to work on
this issue, and blew away the RAID-config on the actual controller.    
I'll
never forget the look on his face when he realized that trying to  
recover
from that was nearly impossible, and then he spouted a classic comment:

	"You guys do have a backup of that data, right?".

	I am not too found of Dell.  Though they provide cheap x86 solutions,
their service is more than questionable.  I have found out that multi- 
vendor
support on Dell HW (say through Sun) is of surprising quality.  I highly
recommend Sun support on Dell equipment now (or even the former STI
company), than Dell itself.

I do know we eventually kicked RH to the curb and with with a
FreeBSD/Postgres solution on those Dell servers (as well as our web
servers), and most problems went away.

	"Long live FreeBSD"


On Aug 29, 2007, at 12:53 PM, William Sutton wrote:

> gured it (still pre-loaded with Red Hat) and pu

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