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

William Sutton william at trilug.org
Wed Aug 29 13:46:57 EDT 2007


That's my recollection of how I understood what JoeO told me at the time.  
As you say, it's been a long time.

-- 
William Sutton

On Wed, 29 Aug 2007, Rory Savage wrote:

> 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
> 
> --
>     _
> |\_\\-\	Rory Savage
> |   \\-| Nuvox Communications
>   \ /~\\  rsavage at nuvox.net
>    `   \\
>         \\
>          ~
> 
> 
> 
> 



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