blade servers (1955)

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

Hi,
  I've got a chassis of these; the machines seem to work OK; however
I've got two issues that are mostly minor but annoying:

   1) The web interface to control them is a pain; it's slow,
is picky about which browser to use and is very non-intuitive;
the classic example (which we've done a couple of times) is that
it is too easy to turn off the whole chassis by accident when
you were actually looking for the thing to power cycle one blade.

   2) The remote KVM is another java based thing that is a bit touchy;
we found the video quality poor with pixel droppings in various places.
(There is a pixel error slider to change a bandwidth/quality trade off
but we can't get it to be really nice even over a 100Mbps connection).
And we found support (Gold) on it really didn't help.  If there is
a Dell guy reading this then PLEASE try and find someone to turn this
into a vnc based system; there are VNC based IP KVMs that are so
much easier to use.

But the machines themselves are fine.

Dave
-- 
 -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code -------   
/ Dr. David Alan Gilbert    | Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy  \ 
\ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM,SPARC,PPC & HPPA | In Hex /
 \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org   |_______/