Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dell's Linux, IT Re-Invention

Posted by Zonk on from the still-looks-blue-to-me dept.

jcatcw writes "An IDG analysis of Dell's attempts to reinvent itself concludes that there are some positive results, but there are problems with the company's supply-chain management and support. One area analysts want to see more improvement: the company's Linux business. 'Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. "It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot," Cole said.'"

38 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Consistency by pickapeppa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I buy a lot of computers for work. I work at a charity that has a nifty agreement with Dell that could save me a ton of money. But I stopped buying Dell computers a few years back because I could not get a consistent product from them. I would buy 10 identical computers, open them up and find a zillion different parts from a zillion manufacturers in them. This drives me crazy. I heard tell that Dell was addressing this, but haven't followed up. I switched to Acer a few years back. If Dell wants to sell me computers again they need A. a guarantee that the sub-contracted bits inside are of a consistent quality, and B. a non-Vista option.

    1. Re:Consistency by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Informative

      You will need to buy the Optiplex line. Just like all the big vendors the consumer grade model varies from batch to batch, only the business line is locked for any real amount of time.

      They do sell XP.

    2. Re:Consistency by mr_mischief · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".

      Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.

      If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.

      I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.

    3. Re:Consistency by blhack · · Score: 4, Informative

      In addition to a non-vista option, they need to offer MS office 2003. A few months ago I logged into dell's website to order a batch of computers and noticed that the option for 2003 had was gone, and they were only offering 2007.

      This is absurd.
      In my experience, there is almost no demand for 2007. What I ended up having to do was sign up for a site licensing agreement with microsoft to get my hands on 2003. In the mean time, I installed OpenOffice on the computers that I had ordered. This prompted my boss to go "Why are we spending 350 bucks a hit on something that we can get for free?".

      So now we use OO exclusively.

      THANKS DELL/MICROSOFT!

      --
      NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
    4. Re:Consistency by TheLinuxSRC · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree with you to a point, however I ran into a *hardware* problem a few years ago with a Dell Dimension (it was a P3 to give you the timeframe). The Dell representative refused support after learning that Linux had been run on the system. For the record, this was a power supply and the machine would not even powerup. I am still not sure how that had anything to do with Linux.

      As a side note, I am in charge of IT purchasing and I was very happy with Dell up until that point. My company buys 8-12 servers a year and they were always Dell (pre-installed with Redhat). After that incident I moved to SuperMicro servers and I have never looked back. I don't even consider Dell anymore.

    5. Re:Consistency by solarce · · Score: 3, Informative

      What you need to do is contact your Dell Small Business account rep (I'm assuming you have one) and talk to him about Open Business Licensing. All you need to do is purchase 5 MS licenses in one chunk (it can be Office, Project, Visio, XP, Vista, 2003, SQL Server, whatever, but it must be 5 licenses in one order) and you can get Open Business licenses.

      What happens after that is that you are given an authorization number and an agreement number (for each license or block of like licenses, say you purchase 3 copies of Office Standard) and you go to eopen.microsoft.com (Live account required :/ ) and login, plugin all your info and BAM! you are given keys for Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007. I've been doing this for two years and it is great because I was able to stick with 2003, but now that we are switching to 2007, 2/3rds of my organization (approx 55 people) already have licenses for both (obviously you can only use one license at a time). You can still purchase Office 2003 install media, afaik. Overall, you will find your licenses are cheaper than retail, but not OEM, but then they aren't tied to a single machine. There is also less headache in tracking because you can view all your agreements/keys on MS's site.

      Email me if you want more information, if you don't have an account representative, I can point you at mine.

      --
      Is a Sig really an expression of the person behind the post or just random nonsense?
    6. Re:Consistency by marcello_dl · · Score: 2, Funny

      What you need to do is contact your Dell Small Business account rep (I'm assuming you have one) and talk to him about Open Business Licensing. All you need to do is purchase 5 MS licenses in one chunk (it can be Office, Project, Visio, XP, Vista, 2003, SQL Server, whatever, but it must be 5 licenses in one order) and you can get Open Business licenses.

      What happens after that is that you are given an authorization number and an agreement number (for each license or block of like licenses, say you purchase 3 copies of Office Standard) and you go to eopen.microsoft.com (Live account required :/ ) and login, plugin all your info and BAM! you are given keys for Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007.


      OT: From the biased perspective of a linux user, I am sad for the human resouce waste of the whole procedure. You make a kernel recompile look like fun. :)
      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
  2. Meh. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mediocre quality, slow delivery, piss poor service and support...What's not to like?

    If you buy a lot of computers and deal with multiple retailers, the contrast can't help but leap out at you. HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Middleman retailers like CDW are fricking lightning fast, and they're really easy to deal with, especially when buying volume.

    Contrast this with Dell...I work for a national corporation that does millions of dollars a year in business with Dell...Or used to. We had representatives in corporate who were in direct contact with high-powered Dell salespeople. Did it expedite anything? No. We have top tier support, does it stop them from sending out techs who know less than non-experts on our local staff? I had to help some dumbass fix a printer once, and my printer repair technique is normally limited to bft.

    I was a big Dell fan...once. I've yet to see any sign that they've done anything but continue their slide toward the low end of the market.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    1. Re:Meh. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If all I cared about was price, I'd buy from HP. And we have a big honkin corporate contract with CDW, so the prices are actually pretty nice.

      We still buy some Dell stuff...Just bought a pair of Poweredge 2950's I'm pretty pleased with, though god help us if we ever need support.

      By and large though, I'd rather buy a more expensive machine with better service and support than a cheaper machine with crappy service and support. We got a shipment of optiplexes not that long ago with a batch of bad capacitors on their motherboards, and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.

      I'm just sick of 'em. It's beyond the pale. We bought 70 new pcs this year at my location, and I think 5 were Dell, and the rest were Macs and HPs.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    2. Re:Meh. by daenris · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Odd. I've had the opposite experience with them. I was heartily anti-Dell because of personal experiences with them and their support. However, once I started working for a large institution that used them as the primary computer supplier, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Every time we had to contact them about problems it was a quick response and extremely quick shipping/service on needed replacement parts. We actually had a bunch of Optiplexes go bad. I opened them up and saw that there were bad capacitors, so I called up our support and told them we had about 8 machines with bad capacitors and about 3 days later our local support guy showed up with new motherboards for the 8 machines, no hassle.

      I would never buy from Dell as an individual, but buying/working with them through my company hasn't given me any problems.

    3. Re:Meh. by rmm4pi8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Interestingly enough, while I have concerns about Dell's build quality (had server issues that were 'known upfront' like the Optiplex capacitor issue you mention), in my experience they're waay cheaper than HP (>30% on the 4 and 8 core servers we typically buy) and I've been really impressed by their speed of support and delivery.

      No, the delivery speed is nothing like CDW, but you're paying (literally) 50% of what the comparable HP from CDW would be (the 30% figure above is based on quotes from HP direct), and the delivery speed is much faster than what we get from Lenovo Direct on laptops, for instance. On support, I've found that they have competent Linux admins, are aggressive about sending out replacement parts, and even though they only officially support Red Hat and SuSE are in fact completely ok with doing troubleshooting on CentOS and Mandriva systems. Also, when I have had problems the "email my manager at" links that go out on the bottom of every email from a Dell employee are monitored religiously. I've had to complain twice to a manager about something, and both times I got both problem remediation and a nice discount for my time and trouble.

      This is on about $50,000 a year volume, so I can't speak to what a smaller business might experience, though obviously we're no Fortune500. Also, and this is I think the real Dell advantage, they actually sell totally configurable systems--you might get the impression from their websites that HP and Lenovo do this, but my experience has been that they will only offer decent discounts and lead times (both pretty expected in a corporate situation) if you're buying a stock or mostly stock SKU.

      --
      U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
    4. Re:Meh. by blhack · · Score: 3, Interesting

      HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Amen to this.

      HP/Compaq have moved their level 2 tech support to British Columbia. I have had 2 laptops in the last two years that have needed replacements and have actually had their tech support staff CALL ME BACK a few days after the warranty claim to check in with me.

      That absolutely blew me away. IT wasn't an automated email, or phone message or anything. it was:
      "Ryan?...he this is Heather from HP....I talked to you earlier this week?"
      "oh hey!"
      "Yeah, i just wanted to make sure that you got the box to put your computer in and that everything was okay!"

      awesome :)
      and no, i don't work for HP....
      Everybody needs to model their tech support after THAT!
      --
      NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
    5. Re:Meh. by ISoldat53 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Interestingly, that used to be the Dell model.

    6. Re:Meh. by g2devi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've just bought a pair of Dell Laptops and these seem to be fairly good quality and everything works flawlessly with Ubuntu (if you apt-get the backports).

      As far as Linux goes, I'd recommend them. The main issue I see with Dell's isn't the the features, it's the anti-features like Media-Direct.

      For those that don't know why this is an anti-feature, a brief explanation, if you press the Media Direct button when the laptop is *off*, it normally runs the Media player for Dell in the Media Direct partition. Sounds good, except if you reformat your drive to reclaim the 40-60GB Vista-mirror+Media-Direct+Dell Utility partitions and put Ubuntu or anything else there. If you do that, Media Direct dumbly messes up your partition table and randomly writes over your disk. Essentially, Media Direct is should be called Media Destruct if you don't follow the Gospel according to Dell. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there isn't even a BIOS feature to turn it off. The only "solutions" I've seen is to write 0s on the entire hard disk (so that the media direct button can't do anything other than display a splash screen) or manually disable the button by opening the case.

      I'm not sure if other vendors have similar anti-features, but it is a big reason I won't even consider doing a BIOS upgrade for my Laptop or keep the Utility partition. The last thing I need is one of these anti-features reverting my machine back to "the button of death" configuration.

    7. Re:Meh. by ryanov · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What's interesting is that I have about 75 GX270's and I don't know about more than a couple that have had motherboards fail. I have had trouble with the USB ports on mine twice now, though... is that the problem we're talking about, or are we talking no-boot?

      Contrast that with the M782 monitors, though, where we had damn near every single one we ordered fail. The "new" ones that come back are clearly not new, either, as they arrive with inconsistent displays (bad convergence on only one side, etc).

    8. Re:Meh. by Nushio · · Score: 2, Funny

      It still is. I got a call from Dell a while ago asking if I had received my Palmrest (mouse buttons were buggy after a year of (ab)use).

      It got kinda annoying considering that I got the palmrest about 2 weeks ago, and it was 8am and I was still asleep :P

      --
      Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
    9. Re:Meh. by GaryOlson · · Score: 2, Informative

      We are talking no power to even get to a BIOS screen. Depending on your purchase cycle depends on what GX270 you received -- bad capacitors or not. I purchased GX270s in small batches over the life of the model; I had a 50/50 failure rate on the motherboard capacitors. (which usually took out the P/S also)

      M782 monitors? OH THE HORRORS! The 17" LCDs are really affordable now. Best just to forget about those monitors; they had bad juju beans.

      --
      Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
  3. Single-page (printing) URL by Lord+of+Hyphens · · Score: 3, Informative

    The whole article on one page.

    --
    "I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
  4. I don't get it by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2, Informative

    "it's not good enough just to boot"
    What do you expect from a commodity server manufacturer? If you want premium (server) hand-holding, buy from a premium (server) manufacturer (HP, IBM, etc.). I have to say, my expectations of OS support from the likes of Dell or MicroCenter or CDW are exactly ZERO. I shop with those guys when I care about price, and maybe a decent hardware warranty.
    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:I don't get it by jswinth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Expectations have definately gotten out of hand. For years people made the argument that Dell should offer Linux pre-installed. Dell didn't want to do it because of the support problems. To which the typical Slashdotter replied, "don't worry, we just want to escape the MS tax and will likely re-install from scratch again anyway." Now that Dell actually does provide Linux installed on more and more machines they are taken to task because of support issues. This isn't going to make other manufacturers want to follow Dell's lead. It is kind of like when your child says, "if you get me the puppy then I will feed and pickup after him, pleeeaaase!" Maybe the "Linux Community" needs to pickup after themselves and stop complaining.

    2. Re:I don't get it by farkus888 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      those with the initiative to pick up after the puppy, to follow your analogy, probably were willing to work to pay for the puppy. [stretching here] that is to say they probably built a custom server. I know that is a big task for a fortune 500 type enterprise server, but most of dells server market is smaller servers than that from what I have seen. if they really wanted to just duck the "ms tax" they would have been asking for clean HDs out of the box. less work for dell and gives them a clean slate to install their own linux. it seems pretty clear the "please preinstall linux" crowd was planning to snowball it to "please support linux" when you look at it that way.

      --
      thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
    3. Re:I don't get it by EdelFactor19 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      theres a larger problem that you are missing; a. they should offer a NO os system and let you put on it what you will.
      b. the largest problems they encounter from the linux world is the fact that they put system features that not just don't work under linux but break it.
      If you offer linux on a product it should work on the product; that means the wireless cards should be supported by the Linux OS that Dell offers; and that dell should steer towards using components that are linux friendly..

      its no different probably from a lot of the heat they will get in regards to vista/xp up and downgrades. You try to change and you can't find the drivers you need for the version because they only gave a CD for one version; and they don't provide a quality list of the named components in YOUR machine and which driver you should be getting.. i remember doing a search with my express tag back in the day and was offered a large amount of different video drivers for many different cards that even seemingly had the same name. sigh.

      the problem seems to be more a tip toeing issue; if you say one word to them that indicates anything (software inclusive) is non-stock (which aside from music, data files, and emails is pretty much everything) they will likely try to say "we dont support that app" and they try to persuade you to think that it has anything to do with anything or that it alleviates them from supporting the stuff THEY put there. case in point: they advertise lots of room for expansion in the pci bays... except they wont support anything there; if are slapping in something simple like a regular sound card, or network card you are usually ok... but when you have a network card, a wireless card, and a sound card there... and you need to add a new card that cant share an IRQ you might run into problems becuase the merry go round game doesnt work; the slots (at least back in 2000-2002) werent hard coded to an irq and reserving didnt quite work; and random things get bounced around and leave some unused or will share an irq with your new device instead of with someother device you could care less about... this is problematic when you try to add something to say take advantage of the hard drive bays, or specialized sound card for digital audio or video capturing / activities... its funny because on an older machine with an older bios you actually could do some of these things... like turn off the LPT and com ports you waste irqs on becuase your printer mouse and keyboard are usb... sad that there are still only 16 irqs still, several never available to user at all. And this was all under WindowsME in the pre XP days; (me did better on this and the audio drivers needed than 98sr2... tho XP fixed a whole lot of it and it all worked properly and better than it ever had; the only irony being that in order to install the software and drivers for the hardware you had to copy the setup cd to a local folder so that you could have the machine lie to the executable and say that it wasnt XP because they decided to hardcode not letting it work normally on XP whcih didnt exist when it was made..

      The other key problem with parent is that there are two different crowds of people saying this. The guy who says he will reinstall from scratch probably isn't the one calling with the stupid support issue; they are the ones who discover things like the directMedia/destroyer problem.

      If they added some notes to the configurator like "this card or option is problematic or lacks open source drivers under linux" etc they might be minimally better off.

      --
      "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
      EdelFactor
  5. Nothing to see here... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Johnny Nobody, owner of , a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS.
    Dell thanks you for your input.

    What is clear is that people are not happy will Dell's support for desktop deployments and smaller customers. But these are not the area that Dell is interested in. The article and many others show that Dell support for their Linux SERVER products is good. Why would a reasonable person expect Dell to support uses like Desktop and small business when that is not their Linux focus? Dell does not sell Linux for the hobby or home user, it's not realistic to expect them to support these segments of customer.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  6. Does anybody see the irony in this situation? by macurmudgeon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We have a company that was successful when the founder was running then foundered under his replacement. Now the founder returns and is righting the ship. Who would have thought that Dell would follow Apple's business model?

  7. It's not irony. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's just that the interim weenie was out for profit at all costs. Profit at all costs makes you a lot of money, initially, but one of the costs is your customer base.

    It's going to take them a long time to win back the people who they alienated.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  8. Dell support and Linux by btm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We've used Dell gear in my last couple of jobs. We had some stupid level of support on our Latitudes at my last job and they'd send people out to replace the hard drives and little rubber feet and everything, which was sort of nice but still annoying to take care of. We use a ton of Dell servers at my new job and at least on the hard drive failures I've seen so far Dell support has been really good at overnighting new drive right out. However, I've always been frustrated by the support levels in the same way as Microsoft licensing. There are too many options, and these options all have different numbers you have to call. Sometimes when I use the online chat support, which is much nicer than sitting on the phone, they kick me away to phone support if I start asking two many Poweredge questions. For Poweredge and linux support I highly recommend their linux-poweredge mailing list. They've got at least a few of their dedicated linux engineers on there but there's good community support as well. Sometimes searching here directly with Google brings back results that you wouldn't have found using the entire intarweb. I'm really pushing for more debian and 64bit support as are many others. OMSA is a beast though. Mebbe IPMI will save the day.

  9. Server side linux support is a joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot,

    Ding! On the server side:

    • OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install
    • Redhat AS / Centos 5.1 are not supported. Various drivers either don't load, or segfault after spewing error messages on the console.
    • All the parameter conventions for their utilities are DOS-style. Example: "-?" to get help. Usage help returned by binaries sucks.
    • There are no man pages....for ANYTHING.
    • Basic unix filesystem conventions, much less the FHS, is/are ignored. Example: OpenManager installs loads of binaries into /etc/openmanager
    • The various update utilities are compiled against older versions of libstdc++. The RPM dependencies don't account for this.
    • The "driver update" DVD contains a "figure out what needs to be updated for firmware/bios", but is also compiled against a specific version of libstdc++. Installing the specific version it demands does nothing- it still refuses to work, claiming it needs the version you just installed. Did I mention that the first time you run suu, it spends several minutes copying itself into /tmp, and that the entire thing is a giant ugly clusterfuck of Java?

    Don't get me started on what pieces of shit the "PERC" raid controllers (made by LSI) are...

    1. Re:Server side linux support is a joke by FreeUser · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install

      Openmanager works fine on CentOS 4.x (x86_64) and Fedora7 (x86_64). We use it where I work with no problems at all.

      (You are perhaps not aware that 64-bit Linux has no trouble running 32-bit apps, as long as you install 32-bit libraries in parallel with 64-bit ones?)

      Redhat AS / Centos 5.1 are not supported. Various drivers either don't load, or segfault after spewing error messages on the console.

      I have not had this problem on any of the Optiplex or Poweredge boxes I've run CentOS 5.x on

      Your other criticisms I agree with for the most part. I could not have said it better with regard to Java, and am not a fan of the PERC controllers either.

      --
      The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    2. Re:Server side linux support is a joke by El_Oscuro · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is pretty similar to the driver experience I have for Dell Windows PCs:

      1. Goto to support.dell.com
      2. Enter service tag for PC
      3. Click on the drivers link
      4. Get a list of about 50 drivers. Attempt to guess which one works for your PC.
      5. Reboot and repeat. Apparently providing the service tag is not enough for them to show you the relevant drivers for your PC.

      If you want to install Windows on one of their servers, you have to use their server configuration CDs which are Linux, as the Windows CDs don't recognize the PERC controllers

      I am writing this from a Dell Ubuntu PC, which I don't need to download drivers for, as all of the hardware is natively supported by Ubuntu. It is the sweetest PC I have ever owned.

      --
      "Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
  10. Re:I've always heard Dell suck, but now I know why by Grinch2171 · · Score: 2, Informative

    We use Dell servers and workstation here at work exclusively and never had an issue with them. We have their Gold support and if something goes wrong, within 4 hours a replacement is here. Tech support for the servers has been top notch. But when it comes to home products they are seriously flawed as my little blog post states. How a company can ship over two thousand dollars worth of hardware to me but won't send me a 200 dollar camcorder because they can't verify who I am is beyond comprehension.

  11. Not sure on their linux side by ducomputergeek · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Ironically, they are the same issues that drove me from recommending Gateway and go with Dell about a decade ago. Really this hit one of my clients about this time last year. (For the record I mostly do my Consulting business in video production arena, which is mostly dominated by Apple at the small/medium level and BOXX for those deploying none-custom Linux boxen) I was doing some work at a small medical supply company who were still running their inventory and billing software on 15 year old DOS based systems.

    However, over the past few years I've been seeing an increase in the number of quality control issues on their PC boxes. Probably from cutting corners in the cost. Something similar happened to Gateway and Packard Bell back in the day. Also, the fact when people called tech support they got someone who barely spoke english and answered questions from a script further served to alienate users.

    This time last year I was working on a project for a small mom & pop medical supply company. It was coming time for a new round of Medicare and state certifications, plus the owners were getting ready to sell the company and retire after running it for 25 years and their 15 year old computers running DOS wasn't going to make the cut. Especially when trying to sell the company. (Hey if you buy it, the first thing you have to do is buy $25k in hardware and software (mostly software).

    Their software vendor was still in business. They recommended going with Dell (They had some sort of deal with them plus had stated they were able to get support from Dell as opposed to HP or other vendors with their product lines). However, the company was also very upfront with the fact that their software WOULD NOT work on Vista.

    I kept telling the business owners they needed to purchase their workstations last January before the switchover to Vista happened. I kept telling them that as soon as Vista was released, they would not be able to get a Dell PC shipped with XP Pro. And I kept getting the: "We have 30k of public aid money coming. We'll buy them when it comes in." Now this was more of a small business owner problem than a Dell problem, but nothing happened for a couple months and I got a phone call at the end of Feb (may have been early March). "We called Dell, and they said they can't(won't) ship a PC workstation with XP pro on it. It's all vista and the software won't work on Vista and probably won't for another year or more!". I was originally hired to back up their data from the DOS box and for my advise on what to do next. (Going to a hosted solution, vs. storing the data locally, which basically meant listen to the sales folks, and then tell the owners of the business my opinion.)

    I was nice and checked around and Gateway was the only somewhat major vendor, ironically, that still offered machines you could order with XP pro installed. Well, they ended up buying Dell's with Vista. and eventually spending another $500 downgrading to XP Pro. And that was after 3 months of being the software vendors Vista beta test bitch (And the software vendor still charged the medical supply company $15k with no discount for the honor)

    And this wasn't the first time. I also remember this happening in the transition from Windows 2k pro to XP. A lot of my clients at the time liked Windows 2K Pro and saw no major need to upgrade right away. (And I still don't blame them.)

    --
    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    1. Re:Not sure on their linux side by rmm4pi8 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You know, I've seen a lot of people complaining about not being able to get XP on new machines, but while Dell's "SOHO" store seems to make that difficult/impossible, the "Small Business" store (which does not require a volume floor, dedicated rep, or anything else) has always made XP fully available. Same goes for the Lenovo website. I fully anticipate both with continue holding out as long as Microsoft lets them in response to market demand from companies like mine which just have no incentive to make the plunge (especially as because XP's been out so long, all of our machines are on it, which is nice, and in addition to the expense anyone who's ever tried to upgrade Windows on 100 laptops knows that's pretty much a non-starter). Also, Dell only offers the better-quality Latitude notebooks through the small business store. Why does anyone even bother with the SOHO store? Is their marketing just that good?

      --
      U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
  12. Poor service, bad field engineers, poor quality by olivercromwell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I work for a large maker of an enterprise wide healthcare application. We sell a complete turnkey system including the hardware (servers and workstations). We used to sell Dell pro-actively as an alternative to Copmpaq/HP. We no longer do so, as we would continually run into problems with poor support, and horrible field engineers (contracted out to Unisys). In one instance, a customer lost a terabyte of data that needed to then be retrieved from tape (the filed engineer started swapping disks between cages in a RAID 0+1 enclosure). After several years of grief, we dropped Dell. If a customer insists on Dell, which som do, we no longer act on their behalf for hardware issues, as we would for an HP shop. Their support contracts cover our software only, and they are on their own as regards hardware support (including negotiating the support agreement itself). As far as I am concerned, Dell sucks, and it will take a WHOLE lot to convince me otherwise.

  13. Interivewed because of Dell IdeaStorm post by jeremycole · · Score: 2

    Since I got interviewed for the article and then quoted in the Slashdot summary, I thought I'd pipe in... I was interviewed by Agam because of my post to Dell's IdeaStorm site about the PERC 5/i RAID controller:

    Leverate LSI to Open Source MegaCli — Dell is using LSI's chipset (LSI MegaRAID SAS) in the PERC 5/i controller, but the tools to manage it are closed source and really suck. Vote on it NOW! :)

  14. Here's a nickel kid get yourself a better computer by wsanders · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not for lack of talent in the Dell Linux team. I've been following the Dell Linux server list for years, having been responsible for all-Dell Linux server farms in the past, and Matt Domsch and the team there has been doing great work, considering the obstacles thrown in their way by the randomness of the hardware.

    This is constantly-morphing commodity hardware, with light-outs support, RAID, and other details optimized for Windows, and a new interface randomly tossed out the door in each new server model. The hardware lands in the the Linux support group's laps after the fact, and they do they best they can, bound by the proprietariness and sometimes just plain weirdness of the hardware features.

    We'll start buying Dells again when they have standalone lights-out management like Sun and HP. They are making slow progress. It's unfair to say their stuff is junk. You can get good support, if you follow their rules.

    --
    Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
  15. Four years Sucking and Counting by ballmerfud · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is no turn around in Dell. And there was better Linux/BSD support for Linux *before* Dell supported Linux.

    We've been a Dell customer for 10 years. The first five years were pretty good. The old PowerEdge servers were pretty nice. But I've never met a Perc card I liked.

    What is a Perc card? Well, it is generic term for the card that Dell happens to be rebranding at the moment.

    What is rebranding? Well, take a perhaps decent card, screw with it for the sake of vendor lock-in, so that the original vendor's drivers and utilities no longer work with it, degrade its performance beyond measure without any hope of cure, and you have a Dell rebrand.

    The new MD1000, while pretty nice arrays, are only officially supported if you use a Perc 5e card. This card is a true Dell rebrand of an LSI MegraRAID. It's a thousand dollar turd. There are no decent utilities (in fact all LSI megaraid utils will NOT work). They even took away some of the simple command line utilities for Linux like lsiutil, and replaced it with a huge, bloated Java application. Can you imagine that piece of bloatware as your only means of talking to your drive array? And FreeBSD support, while the FreeBSD community has made a valiant effort trying to support this piece of shit, still is not worth it. It's lackluster performance at best.

    But here's the real kicker about the Perc 5e: It does not allow direct pass through. Yeah, that's right, if you get fed up with it's lame RAID 10 performance (and it is lame we've confirmed that software RAID on Linux and FreeBSD is significantly faster), you can't directly reach your drives. So if you want to implement software RAID, you have to configure independent RAID0 virtual disks in the Perc 5e BIOS. Why? so Dell can lock you in to their proprietary, rebranded, turd card. This is a wonderful new feature unique to the Perc 5 that wasn't there with Perc 4.

    But, as we found out, the Perc 4 was an even bigger piece of crap. It was a rebranded Adaptec that had over a year-long history of locking up under heavy loads on Linux systems. They were selling this so-called Linux supported PowerEdge 2650 (boat anchor) for over a year knowing that it locked up under stress:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=92129

    We got burned by this and it took us weeks to resolve (went through 3 Perc 4 cards with same result, and ended up putting in a LSI card).

    If you need anything with real RAID support, run from Dell. We've been pretty pleased with the MD1000, but that Perc 5 card sums up Dell. Buy a 3ware or Areca instead. Who cares if Dell won't support the MD1000 if you use it, they don't support it anyway. Of all our calls to Dell enterprise support, we've talked to one person who seems to have half of a clue.

    There is no such thing as Dell support. And their lame attempt at vendor lock-in only makes it worse. And that is why Dell is drowning.

    We've moved to HP. And we've been really happy with our HP servers. Is HP support any better? I can't say. But we don't have near the vendor lock-in and rebranded voodoo we get from Dell.

    --
    http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
  16. Dell complaining about low uptake of Linux PCs by OwlWhacker · · Score: 2

    Dell recently moaned about the low uptake on its Linux PCs. I'm not surprised, considering what they were offering.

    I have bought several machines from Dell over the past few years, the latest being an Inspiron 550, and have installed Linux on all of them.

    Fedora 8 runs beautifully on the Inspiron 550, which is a very inexpensive machine, for which there is no option to buy with Linux installed.

    So, really, Dell shouldn't complain about the low uptake on its Linux PCs but should offer more diversity of machines that come with Linux!

    --
    Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
  17. Poor prices from Dell, sorta by Kickstart70 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We buy a ton of computers from Dell and HP and the one thing that really bugs me about Dell is that they give price breaks on the same models to consumers first, and then we 'premium' buyers basically have to beg them to match that price. Same models, crappier prices for their business customers. I just don't understand....do they think we can't see their banner ads all over the internet?