[Beowulf] Re: recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room:fullcluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Buccaneer for Hire.
<buccaneer at rocketmail.com> wrote:
> The first thing they ask for, when you call the vendor, is for an asset tag or serial number. We keep it in the DB so I can always verify it. It is even better when the vendor makes is easier to get it through dmidecode.

Yup. That is what they always ask for. The helpdesk engineers won't
even talk to me (justified!) unless I assure them I have a
valid-service tag and my BIOS firmware is up-to-date (more flexible!)

 (it raises an interesting thought I had: I wish the sales guys
sometimes gave me a "dummy" service tag while I am evaluating hardware
options to buy a new cluster. Often times one doesn't really want to
try-and-buy each option (then I would get a service tag!) but yet one
has questions that are not answered in the spec sheets or the manuals
are hazy. The support-engineers are often the most knowledgeable about
these nuts-and-bolts aspects I've found. But in the absence of a
service tag it's hard to get access to them. )

Keeping the BIOS firmware up-to-date is a chore though. When we are
choosing Linux distros in the interest of stability a frequently
updated firmware gets irritating. I guess it's a tradeoff to enjoy
bug-fixes feature-additions so maybe I shouldn't be cribbing......

-- 
Rahul