Dell "software"

[mark]

Steve Phillips wrote:
> mark wrote:
>> And if this is "accepted" as common, then I reiterate, it's amateur, 
>> in the *worst* sense of the word. I wanted to save all the data, as 
>> I'd doing an upgrade of a full release. As I said in my article in the 
>> July SysAdmin magazine, it's always better to do a full install when 
>> going up a full release, since nobody gives you a good way to do that, 
>> as they do for a subrelease upgrade.
> 
> You will probably find that this is simply a driver issue with, not so 
> much the CD ROM drive but the controller it is attached to.

I'm sure it's a driver issue. But I haven't had that kind of problem - where it 
couldn't find the CD drive it had booted off - since the first time I put Linux 
on a laptop, what, in the late nineties.
> 
> You will probably find that the controller is newer than the linux 
> distribution that you are using, I would almost put money on the fact 
> that you could download the latest RHEL 5 cds and everything would work.

a) It's a Dell PowerEdge 850. We bought it well over a year ago. RHEL 4, 
subrelease whatever (Nahant?), is not that old; further, it *came* *with* the 
server.
b) RHEL 5 is not an option. It would have to be approved by corporate, and 
that's not going to happen soon. This is not for me at home, this is me, 
working at a huge, Fortune 50 company. I have no options on this.
> 
> You will probably also find that you can download a driver disk from 

I've already used their crap. And found even more "fun" (for *very* small 
values of fun): IT INSTALLS LINUX FOR YOU. They've apparently got a kickstart 
file in there, and you have no choice of what you want. It also puts things in 
non-standard places. Java, for example, seems to be under /usr/share. Since Sun 
wants it under /usr/java, and that's the way it's installed everywhere else, it 
completely breaks our software builds.

> dell which will probably contain instructions on how to use the driver 
> to get a bootable image up and running so you can do an install off 
> standard media.

The "quick start" guide doesn't even offer comments to that effect.
<snip>
> Take satisfaction that in a years time when someone else posts the same 
> complaint about $company and their braindead 'restore cd process' you 
> can chuckle away knowing that you've been in a similar situation.

I will not chuckle. I will be pissed along with them, that the same company is 
still pulling the same crap.

	mark