[rescue] A wee bit off-topic

[Dan Duncan]

A few years ago, we purchased 8 "identical" Dell Poweredge 2950 servers.
Service tags were all very close together.  They were all built and
deployed to 4 different locations.  (in pairs)

After running in production for a while we encountered an intermittent hang
on a couple of them which was potentially addressed by a DRAC firmware
update that had been released since they were deployed.  We tested the
update on a test system and nothing broke so we deployed it to the
production systems.  Out of 8 systems, we got about 6 different results.  2
of them bricked the DRAC requiring physical replacement of the board.  4 of
them failed in different places but a subsequent attempt to flash the
firmware was successful. 2 of them updated with no problem.

These were ostensibly identical systems being flashed from one identical
version to another identical firmware version.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Ross Lonstein <ross-sunhelp at lonsteins.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 11:28:14AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> > Dell, the brand I'm most familiar with, has consumer and business lines
> of
> > computers (desktop and laptop). The business line of desktops and
> laptops are
> > considered 'stable' over their life - internal components don't
> evolve/change.
>     [snip]
>
> I'm not in the enterprise realm currently but for Dell and HP the
> claim is false, it's "stable" only in comparison to consumer
> kit. Across thousands of units over several years, components and/or
> firmwares changed without notice before deployment and it caused
> headaches for us.
>
> - Ross
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>



-- 
Dan Duncan