[5871] in Release_7.7_team

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RE: [RHE] Dell, Red Hat, and $500 doorstops

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan McIndoe Hunt)
Thu Nov 1 17:11:19 2007

From: "Jonathan McIndoe Hunt" <jmhunt@MIT.EDU>
To: "'andrew m. boardman'" <amb@mit.edu>, <release-team@mit.edu>,
   <rhe-release@mit.edu>, <bmurphy@mit.edu>
Cc: "'Software Release Core Team'" <swr-core@mit.edu>, <ditr@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200710312208.l9VM8lsE006666@pothole.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 17:10:30 -0400
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Atticus installed Vista on a 755 today to have a similar experience, no
Network driver what fun!

Jon
___________________________________________________
Jonathan McIndoe Hunt     MIT EECS '97 617.253.0172
Manager Software Services
Client Support Services
Information Services & Technology, MIT
http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/software/


-----Original Message-----
From: rhe-release-bounces@MIT.EDU [mailto:rhe-release-bounces@MIT.EDU] On
Behalf Of andrew m. boardman
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 6:09 PM
To: release-team@MIT.EDU; rhe-release@MIT.EDU; bmurphy@MIT.EDU
Subject: [RHE] Dell, Red Hat, and $500 doorstops


[Note the wide-ranging CC.]

We've been buying Dell gx745 machines.  They work OK for Athena 9.4,
which is based on RHEL 4, and RHEL 5 is OK, too.

Someday, we're probably going to switch to buying Dell gx755 machines,
their replacement for the deprecated gx745 and the machine almost certain
to be the new "MIT recommended desktop".  Unfortunately, they don't have
network support under Athena 9.4 or otherwise from the underlying RHEL
4.5, nor do they have network support under the RHEL 4.6 beta (which I
currently have installed on my 755).  RHEL 5, including the beta of RHEL
5.1, is also no good.

For now, I suggest warning potential independent RHEL users off of the
755 whenever possible.  While it's fairly easily possible to download a
functional driver direct from Intel, it's not clear that this represents
a support path we want to go down.  (Of course, the people who actually
support it are more than welcome to argue with me here.)

What to do with Athena is a harder question.  Given the high degree of
control we have over the environment, it looks at least reasonably doable
to support the 755 in the current installer and in the release; since
Intel provides an rpm packaging option, we'd just need to build a new
driver rpm for any patch release that includes a kernel upgrade, and
adding a hook for this to the installer is trivial.  On the one hand,
this represents some extra work (and extra complexity to break things in
unexpected ways) that we may not want to deal with right now.  On the
other hand, there are only two months worth of gx745 availability, after
which we'd need to start giving our customers who buy the "standard MIT
desktop" some fairly bad news, so I propose adding this to the next patch
release and having that patch release be this term.

As far as customers go, note that if one looks at Dell's web site as a
generic customer, they say:

   Looking for OptiPlex 745?
   We are sorry! The product you are searching for is no longer
   available.  Please have a look at OptiPlex 755 which is the latest
   equivalent to the 745.

...however, according to Andy Meyer (our Dell inside sales guy), they're
taking orders from us for the gx745 until 31 December 2007.  Still, this
is only likely to increase confusion.

If anyone wants details about the 755 (that I can answer from the
perspective of having one in front of me running RHEL), just ask.

Andrew Boardman/ZINC/ISDA/IS&T/MIT  +1.617.253.4040  amb@mit.edu
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