Re: Ideal Server Hardware Choice

On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 17:56 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
In case you get Dell, read these articles:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3243
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3262
The articles are a few years old now, but the gist is that Dell have
been known to use standard ATX physical power connectors, but wired to
Dell standards. So you can plug them into other manufacturers kit, and
quite possible wave goodbye to both power supply and motherboard.

Well that's a piece of information I did not have. Thank you for that.
Fortunately the only Dell systems we've had to date have been
workstations for email and haven't needed repair, they're just going
obsolete.

My experience with name brand systems has been that you need support
contracts anyway -- there's too much custom-designed stuff inside, and
the only easy way to get spare parts is through official support.

This is certainly the reason we haven't dealt with name brand pre-built
systems yet. Pre-built systems do tend to be proprietary, I think the
hope/perception is that they've taken the extra time to certify that the
hardware they do put together is 100% compatible and even specifically
designed to work as an optimized system. This could eliminate any risk
of incompatibilities with custom built systems where tolerance
calculations my be just a little out of range.


As for the original question, I'd be cautious about SATA adapters. In
particular, I understand you can't install Fedora Core 4 using SATA CD
drives or DVD drives (because the libata drivers in the Fedora install
media don't support ATAPI, which CD and DVD drives need). And there have
been some people reporting that the FC4 install media won't detect the
SATA adapters on the latest nForce 4x0 motherboards (nForce 4 seems to
be OK.)

Well i haven't heard about that either. I will definately have to
remember that. We have SATA systems going and we know that the
smartmontools seems to have some incompatiblities with SATA still.
Specifically:

Mar 2 10:35:20 msi2 smartd[6218]: Device /dev/sda, SATA disks accessed
via libata are not currently supported by smartmontools. When libata is
given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an additional '-d libata' device
type will be added to smartmontools.

Hopefully this will happen some day soon.


For what it's worth, my company's experience with the local dealers
ended during the days of AMD K6 processors. They were all buying
motherboards (mostly from PCChips), based on the cheap and *extremely*
tacky SiS chipsets of the day. This cut around £20 off the cost of a
system, and left us with unreliable junk that was *just* about reliable
enough that we couldn't take it back. Until one of the on-board Ethernet
adapters went wrong, taking down the entire network. We ended up
rebuilding the worst four around Gigabyte motherboards with Via
chipsets.

We found it surprisingly difficult to find suppliers who would
consistently use quality hardware: if you tried to buy more expensive
machines, you'd just get faster processors, larger disks and more memory
on the same cheap motherboards. Since then we've been building our own
systems around "name brand" components (Kingston or Crucial memory, Asus
or Gigabyte motherboards, etc) and have had very few problems.

But then, you'll notice I'm in the UK too:

hee hee hee touche!


So either we live in parallel universes or the Chinese are selling
quality cheap parts to the UK and leaving all the junk for us poor
Americans (oh no, I've gone political..).




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