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

[hewitt_tech]

The SC430 is definitely Dell's entry level server. The customer asked me if it was Dell and all I could say was that I have other Dell servers at other customer sites that seem to be moderately reliable. I say "moderately" because the Dell servers I'm talking about are 2550 and 2640 rack mount systems that have had hardware problems but didn't actually go offline due to the hardware failures. In one case a 2650 had a SCSI controller error but would clear itself and boot on a hard restart. I can only attribute the failures at this customer site to bad luck. Dell's server support people have been fine but having 3 server down hardware failures in approximately two months isn't exactly reliable. The customer as you might suspect doesn't have a lot of confidence in their Dell server at this point...

-Alex

P.S. This server seemed to be a good choice since the customer only has 5 users and is not likely to expand much beyond this number of users.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Thomas Charron 
  To: hewitt_tech 
  Cc: gnhlug-discuss at gnhlug.org 
  Sent: Monday, July 10, 2006 1:15 PM
  Subject: Re: A possible reason to prefer an open source server...


    Generally, I've had different experiences with Dell servers.  Typically, they work very well, and Dell themselves tends to solve problems fairly well.

    Now, in defence, you got the cheapest of the cheapcheapcheap servers that Dell sells.  If this server is supposed to be standalone, and buisness critical, not having redudency is like having unprotected sex with hookers. 

    Thomas


  On 7/10/06, hewitt_tech <hewitt_tech at comcast.net> wrote:
    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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