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

[Kevin J.]

I did tech support for Dell and other hardware vendors years ago and unless things have changed it is all outsourced to third party contractors who rarely check the backgrounds of their employees. I've seen a lot of incompetence in the support staff for many vendors, not just Dell. I'm not sure about IBM these days, but most of them have gone this route and it's pretty much hit and miss as to the skill level of the technician who shows up at your door. 

At my last job, I got in to the habit of just taking the part from the technician and replacing it myself then giving the old part to the tech so he could ship it back. Most of the time, I knew more about our systems than the techs who showed up. I wouldn't trust most of them as far as I could gently throw them.

Kevin 


----- Original Message ----
From: Rory Savage <rsavage at nuvox.net>
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 1:37:52 PM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] "The Linux Experience" at Dell, a tale of woe and wow. VERY LONG


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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