two bargains? MB+CPU; 1U server

[Tyler Aviss]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 11:29:07AM -0400, Mike Kallies wrote:
>> Lennart, I'm curious, what kind of rack-mounted machines do you like?
>
> I don't really.  They are all too proproitary, although that's hard to
> avoid for rackmount.  In my experience IBM rackmount servers are very
> nice and very reliable.  Their hardware also seems to work with linux in
> almost every case which has certainly not been the case for Dell hardware.
>
>> In my experience every manufacturer and even every model of rack-mounted
>> hardware has its own quirks.  It's best to stick to one manufacturer and
>> as few different models as possible.  Every little thing like how to
>> report failures on redundant power, how Ethernet devices come up on
>> boot, how to use remote management cards, or how the device handles a
>> hot swap of a PS/2 keyboard/mouse, fan failures, temperature sensors,
>> how to monitor/rebuild your SCSI array, they're all different.
>
> Yep, unfortunately they are all different.
>
>> My point being, the question shouldn't be "should I buy this Dell server
>> because it is cheap?" but "how much research do I have to do to put this
>> thing in production, how much documentation do I have to write to
>> maintain it and if I need more, how much longer can I buy that model of
>> device?"
>>
>> I don't mind Dell Desktops.  They have lots of non-stanard stuff, but
>> you're depending on Dell to honour their warranty... and while I dont'
>> deal with them a lot, I found their warranty and warranty service to be
>> okay.  I ask for parts.  They send them to me, I send the old ones back.
>
> Their quality is awful compared to a lot of other companies though.
>
> They have also been the worst offender and using proprietary parts.
> A Dell desktop can only use a Dell type power supply because apparently
> they could save $5 or $10 on their machines by using their own pinout
> and powersupply design.  They have shipped hardware with the same Model
> name as what you could buy at retail, but with a lot less features.
> Again, they saved $10 and the customer got a lot less than they thought
> they were payuing for.  Dell sold Matrox video cards in the past with
> half the ram of the retail card and with no upgrade socket (which the
> retail cards also had).  Did they mention that it was a different Dell
> specific model?  Of course not.  Dell purposely rips off their customers.
> If you buy from them, it is at your own risk.
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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>

One a standard upright desktop, they thankfully seem to be behaving a
bit better these days in terms of components like PSU's etc. I just
replaced a PSU on a Dell Studio desktop and the replacement dropped in
just fine.

On the other hand, I had a heck of a time finding a motherboard to
replace the one that got fried. Apparently this computer was
originally between $1000-1200 (Core 2 Quad, 6GB RAM, Dual RAID 500GB
Drives, blah blah). Dell wanted $480 JUST FOR THE MOTHERBOARD.

I found several difficulties in replacing it:
a) A full-size board wouldn't quite fit in there
b) A smaller-sized board only tended to come with 2 RAM slots, this
had four full (2x2GB and 2x1GB). MITX was out, and I couldn't find a
decent MATX that seemed to fit in there either

Ended up getting them an ebay-special refurbed board for that machine
($65 + $30 shipping) . I *hate* doing that but nobody online seemed to
have what I wanted.

Maybe if Dell made a computer with something better than what appears
to be a shitty 350W bargain-basement PSU, the thing wouldn't have had
issues in the first place. The rest of the components seemed decent,
and the overall case design was actually fairly nice.

So yeah. Avoid Dell desktops. Unfortunately most companies seem to
skimp where it counts. Crap PSU's are *VERY* common, and those tend to
go the soonest and be fairly adept at taking out other components when
they do so.
I'm not really sure what the alternatives are for non-technical people
other than have a geek do a build-a-box. There are "antec" computers,
but those are pretty pricey, and the HP's I've seen are
as-bad-or-worse-than Dells, and Acer/MSI/Gateway just scare me...

-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2/CLA

“It can takes months to gain a customer, but only seconds to lose one"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists