[Beowulf] Repeated Dell SC1435 crash / hang. How to get the vendor to resolve the issue when 20% of the servers fail in first year?

[Prentice Bisbal]

Matt Lawrence wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Gerry Creager wrote:
> 
>> Dell have told us they won't support us or accept reports of problems
>> running anything but RHEL on our cluster.  We therefore have one admin
>> who has been brainwashed into believing RHEL is actually spelled
>> "CentOS".  He calls in hardware problems and can tell them we're
>> running what he believes is RHEL...
> 
> Except for the storage group, who have no clue at all about Linux and
> very bad attitudes, I haven't had any real troubles getting support from
> Dell. Maybe it's a difference in approach.
> 

As I said earlier, I purchased a "turn-key" (or "shrink-wrapped", in the
parlance of another poster) system from Dell. The actual setup was don
on site by a 3rd party that installed ROCKS, which uses CentOS for the
actual Linux distro.

On the Letter of Understanding (Dellspeak for service contract that
covers their ass only), and the system workbook they sent us beforehand,
CentOS was mentioned as one of the Linux distros to choose from.

At my site, we use a locally maintained rebuild of RHEL. Whenever tech
support from any company asks if I'm using Red Hat, I say yes, since
it's a binary compatible rebuild. It's never been a problem. And I've
even sent DSET reports to Dell techs. One section of the DSET report
lists the distro and kernel version, so they could easily tell that I'm
nut running the official RHEL Distro.

Of course, DSET probably just looks at /etc/redhat-release, which can be
set to whatever you want it to be using the text editor of your choice,
if you really want to hide your tracks.


-- 
Prentice