A possible reason to prefer an open source server...

[hewitt_tech]

I have a very nice customer that's been putting up with some amazingly bad luck with a Dell SC430 server. 90 days after I installed it the server decided to flash all it's LEDs and become unavailable. Dell responded by replacing the motherboard, power supply, CPU and hard drive. 5 weeks later the SATA hard drive had a stroke and was completely lost. This morning I get a call that "the server is down". I arrive on site within 5 minutes to find that indeed the server is down. The LED on the motherboard is lit, the front panel shows the ethernet icon (and the ethernet LEDs are blinking) but otherwise the machine is down. Dell tech support asks me to pull the memory to see if there are any beep codes (nothing). They have me pull the CPU and reseat it (nothing). The power button has an LED that would normally be green but is amber which according to Dell technical support means that the system is in standby mode. Nothing works to get the system to boot or POST. They are now in the process of sending motherboard, CPU, power supply out tomorrow morning. 

But the interesting part of this is that the customer wanted Exchange server to centralize their email, contacts and schedules. With the server down, the email clients don't work and they can't access any of the messages stored on the server (of course). Bill Sconce and I just set up an Open Source file server for a client but a key feature is that the clients aren't controlled by the server as they would be in a MIcrosoft environment. 

When the customer's server is available again I'm going to de-centralize their email and set up batch jobs on each workstation to copy their email back to the server for archiving purposes. 

This would have been an academic exercise if the Dell server had actually been able to function for more than a few weeks at a time.

-Alex
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