Re: Dell-Oracle-Linux: Anyone else run this...because its not working for us!

  • From: Janine Sisk <janine@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: mkb125@xxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:09:08 -0800

On Nov 16, 2005, at 11:52 AM, mkb wrote:

Hehehehe...I just finished a call with Dell support -
memory issue for probably the 3rd time this year.

We are a much smaller shop than the rest of you and we run dinky little servers by comparison, but even I have a Dell horror story. We had one server we bought a few years ago, I think it was a 2550 but I'm not sure about that, that had hardware problems from day one. I was trying to load a multi-GB Oracle export and the system kept restarting itself halfway through. Dell very reluctantly sent replacement parts several times but we were never able to get it fully working. It has exhibited a multitude of symptoms over the years.


My sys admin is both busy and lazy and he didn't follow up very well with Dell, plus they moved as slowly as humanly possible, with the result that the machine finally went out of warranty and still was not working right. We have never been able to use it in production.

The sys admin finally figured out what the root cause is some time ago; he read somewhere that this particular hardware has disk controller problems when you have two CPUs in the box and are running Linux. It would probably work fine if we could take one of the CPUs out, but you can no longer buy the appropriate blanks from Dell. They know about the problem, but have never managed to fix it (not that they are admitting to, anyway). I should say for the record that this info is third-hand or worse and should not be relied upon as the gospel truth, even though I have no reason to doubt it based on our experience.

We have continued to buy servers from Dell (holding our noses each time) because they have been the most cost-effective choice, even with the hassle factor. But I have been reading lately that they are telling analysts they are going to bump up their profit margins and do less discounting. I almost hope that happens, just so I have an excuse to buy from someone else!

janine

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