5. Dell: Some Positives and Negatives

From Anonymous

First of all I've been relatively happy with the support I have received from Dell. I usually can identify a problem and it's really just a matter of getting the parts to remedy the issue.

The main gripe I have with dealing with Dell is that sometimes I have to spend a fair amount of time on the telephone with some jackass explaining that I know I have a failed hard drive. Of course he'll want me to repeat everything I already did to identify the problem and it's a big waste of time for me. This all depends on what technician you get and whether he is cool or not.

The Good

Several years ago I had a strange problem with one of my raid controllers. For some reason the machine was throwing errors during the post of the controller. I swapped in a spare (known good) controller and the same thing was happening. I tested a few other things and I came to the conclusion that it was a motherboard problem.

Dell PowerEdge 6800 Server (Courtesy of Dell Inc.)

I called Dell and I spoke with a technician. He had me test the disks and also the backplane of the machine. Everything checked out and it was looking like it was indeed a motherboard issue. He finally told me to update the bios and firmware...I laughed. I said out loud: "Are you kidding? This machine was fine and just out of the blue it stops working. We've ruled out the raid controller, the backplane, the cables, the disks...surely it must be the mobo".

He pretty much agreed with me but he had to go through the motions before dispatching a new motherboard for the system.

I applied the updates and somehow, someway - it fixed the machine. This is by far one of the stranger things that I've encountered dealing with servers...so I always remember to test this out.