Re: hardware advice

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.