Re: hardware advice

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 11:33 AM, M. D. <lists(at)turnkey(dot)bz> wrote:
> On 09/28/2012 09:57 AM, David Boreham wrote:
>>
>> On 9/28/2012 9:46 AM, Craig James wrote:
>>>
>>> Your best warranty would be to have the confidence to do your own
>>> repairs, and to have the parts on hand. I'd seriously consider
>>> putting your own system together. Maybe go to a few sites with
>>> pre-configured machines and see what parts they use. Order those,
>>> screw the thing together yourself, and put a spare of each critical
>>> part on your shelf.
>>>
>> This is what I did for years, but after taking my old parts collection to
>> the landfill a few times, realized I may as well just buy N+1 machines and
>> keep zero spares on the shelf. That way I get a spare machine available for
>> use immediately, and I know the parts are working (parts on the shelf may be
>> defective). If something breaks, I use the spare machine until the
>> replacement parts arrive.
>>
>> Note in addition that a warranty can be extremely useful in certain
>> organizations as a vehicle of blame avoidance (this may be its primary
>> purpose in fact). If I buy a bunch of machines that turn out to have buggy
>> NICs, well that's my fault and I can kick myself since I own the company,
>> stay up late into the night reading kernel code, and buy new NICs. If I have
>> an evil Dilbertian boss, then well...I'd be seriously thinking about buying
>> Dell boxes in order to blame Dell rather than myself, and be able to say
>> "everything is warrantied" if badness goes down. Just saying...
>>
> I'm kinda in the latter shoes. Dell is the only thing that is trusted in my
> organisation. If I would build my own, I would be fully blamed for anything
> going wrong in the next 3 years. Thanks everyone for your input. Now my
> final choice will be if my budget allows for the latest and fastest, else
> I'm going for the x5690. I don't have hundreds of users, so I think the
> x5690 should do a pretty good job handling the load.

If people in your organization trust Dell, they just haven't dealt
with them enough.