Tracy Reed made the following keystrokes: >Overall this is great news. But we've been down this hopeful road with Dell >at least a couple of times before.
I agree we've been down this road. It scares me when they do it. IF they are pushing the sources for their devices up so that they can continue to be used, great. Otherwise, buyer beware. Longer term support for these models is not something typically considered. You have the OS that came installed on the system and that's it. Don't expect to run the next kernel release or .... The more they customize things, the less likely for real support. I ran into this problem a number of years back. Bought a Dell server with hardware raid card in it. After a year or so of use one of the disks in the raid went bad. Turned out to be the first disk in the system. Things were OK as long as that specific disk was in slot 0. Attempts to replace the disk were futile as it wasn't hot-swap and the system complained about not having proper disk installed if drive0 didn't match at power up. It could get the drive-id just no data. Turns out the CD shipped with the system had Dell-RH on it, but not the pieces to boot from the raid controller. When Dell builds the systems, they just disk-dup, not install the way it's done in the field. Dell had since upgraded the firmware and hardware of the card, with the only upgrade available to us being a new motherboard. Nothing wrong with the board we had, so it was a "purchase upgrade" if you wanted to go that route. Bottom line solution was to do an emergency last minute catch all changes backup with the dead disk in the system. Then pull the little raid adapter extention off the motherboard to let it just be plain disk access. Then build a generic system on the new disk and finally restore the rest from backup. During the process we turned on software raid which turned out to run just about as fast as the hardware raid we had installed with little overhead so we were back in a better position than we started out. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
