- jmedlin: The food court is overrun with tiny savages on a field trip.
- jmedlin: It's official, Windows hates me.
- jmedlin: Telling a gun owner that the zombies aren't going to come is like telling a kid that there's no Santa Claus.
- jmedlin: Not a fan of the new google reader.
- jmedlin: Just wrote my first iPhone app, its no more sophisticated than a fart button but its a start.
Syndicate
The joy of dealing with the Xserve
The Xserve at work has been a wonderful server that never gives us trouble and the Apple customer support for it has been even better than that.
I wish that were true.
From the first week we got the Xserve it has been one problem after another and trying to get help from Apple has been like pulling teeth. The first issue arose about a week into having the server set up, it would intermittently refuse to boot and it wouldn't be able to see its disks. After a week of talking with Apple we finally got a technician out to attempt some repairs, after replacing both the motherboard and the RAID card we were still having the intermittent booting issues. After all that mess I told them to just send me a new server because we were tired of trying to fix this one, that opened up a whole new bag of worms. Most hardware vendors (especially dealing with server equipment) will send out a new part or server and just have you ship back the defective part. Apple wanted us to ship back our defective Xserve first and couldn't even offer to send us packing material and postage to do so. After a little more of getting the run around I finally talked someone into sending us the new server and allowing us to ship the old one back in it's packaging, but wait it wasn't that simple. They wanted us to give them a credit card number to be sure we weren't going to stiff them on sending back the old server. After some more conversations with customer support they decided to send us the new box without requiring a credit card number.
So about a whole month after first contacting Apple about the defective server we had a working replacement.
The next issue we had was not nearly as bad as defective hardware, it was just poor software. There is an issue with the EFI firmware updater that will not allow you to update the EFI firmware from a copy of the operating system that is installed on a RAID volume. Now somebody please tell me why you would not have the operating system of your server installed on a raid volume. After a few calls to the perpetually confused Apple Care, their best advice was to install another copy of OSX to an external disk and boot the server from it to install the update. That has got to be one of the most ridiculous procedures I have ever heard of to do an update.
