So of the three brand-new servers I bought a few weeks ago, two are dead. One starts up with the fans howling, but doesn’t do anything beyond that (no POST, no setup menu, no OS). The other doesn’t do anything at all.
Turns out the second one was a failed power supply, which I swapped from the first. It seems to be working. The first one probably has a bad motherboard or something.
So of course having two of three new servers fail only days after installing them makes me pretty nervous about trusting my entire web- and database hosting business to them. But that aside, a technician was supposed to arrive today (next-day express service) and he won’t be here because I found out– after serveral phone calls– that a memory module failed to ship so he won’t have the parts necessary to do a proper repair.
While that’s irritating, it’s more irritating that I wasn’t notified of the change. I spoke with my tech rep yesterday at 5pm– right on the closing bell– and he said everything looked good. I understand that logistics sometimes cause problems, but I would expect some kind of notification of it. Further, I have a spare memory module from the second server that the technician could have used.
So now it’ll be sometime next week before anyone shows up, and in the meantime I’ve got $3,000 worth of computer equipment on my office floor doing me no good. For my first experience with “real” servers, I must say I’m woefully disappointed.
When the saga ends, someone at Dell will be getting a piece of my mind. With pickles and relish.