| Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
17:31 - Beacons of Technological Genius
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I had a rude surprise today.
In the server room, one of my servers rebooted (for reasons which remain unclear, but which aren't important). This is a Dell PowerEdge 1550, the workhorse 1U box that Dell claims to be the great value leader in the marketplace, making upper-middle-managers out of bean-counting schmoozers and forging lucrative business deals on golf courses.
Those smarmy Dell server ads never seem to mention little things like:
If you take the front panel off the machine, the BIOS detects this. It's a security feature. It warns you, upon the next boot, that "Alert! Cover was previously removed. Strike F1 to continue."
Nice. Good little feature. Useful.
Unless, of course, there is no way to CLEAR this error.
That's right. The Dell PowerEdge servers, or at the very least the 1550s, provide no way to clear the cover-removed error and boot-pause after it has occurred. Our IT architect called Dell to try to resolve this problem, to find out how we can restore the (seemingly natural) ability of our rack-mounted servers to reboot automatically and come back to full working capacity after a remote reboot or a power failure.
And Dell's tech support had no idea how to do this.
In other words, if you ever take the front cover off of your 1550, even once... from that moment on, your server will never again auto-boot.
I guess that's what makes Dell such a value leader, though. People love cheap crap-- they prefer paying less over having more quality. Always have.
Sigh. <F1>
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