Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server
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@Carnival-Boy keep in mind that in several of these cases the question about how to approach this came up as an attempt to document best practices, based on tons of observation, peer review, etc. This thread itself, for example, is based on decades of experience and tons of peer review and tons of observations of companies making this exact mistake. The timing of this article was because yet another company had a major outage caused by not following this best practice. The article and the post had nothing to do with you, no one knew what you had been doing.
Your response here was to state how you were doing things differently and not following this practice. That's fine, maybe you have a case where the best practice would not apply or maybe it isn't really a best practice and that should be addressed. But you were essentially taking the tact of either "this is wrong" or "maybe this does not apply to me."
From the discussion, did we not determine that very key, basic server setup items like OOB management setup was being missed by your installation guys and that you were overpaying by a wide margin and that you had a support knowledge gap in the processes? Was this not helpful?
You say that you feel that you have been doing a good job and I'm sure that you have. But has this not been useful and insightful and allowed for you to potentially do an even better job with better IT coverage at lower cost? Would it not be disrespectful to you as an IT practitioner to not probe into these items and look for improvement?
At the end of this discussion, while finding out that something we did in the past could have been improved, didn't this make things better for the future or at very least provide important perspective? You seem upset, but I felt like we genuinely helped you here and provided value to you (and hopefully to others who come along and read this as well.)
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And that last piece has to be noted - in cases like this where we are specifically working to develop or document best practices for the industry, or are reviewing them, discussing them, etc. and you post a dissenting viewpoint we really have no choice but to discuss that and prove because either the best practices are wrong and need to be adjusted or the fact that there is conflicting information needs to be cleared up so that someone who has not delved into this thoroughly does not get confused.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
And I would call him an engineer, regardless of what @scottalanmiller says. The hardest part of the last job was installing the SAS expander card.
What would be his full title then? What kind of engineer do you feel that he is?
As installing a SAS card is no different than installing a graphics card, do you feel that every kid at Geek Squad that installs GPUs and hard drives is an engineer? If not, what's the difference and where do you draw the line to differentiate between the two tasks of plugging in parts to a computer?
Technically, the Geek Squad work is harder because they have to figure out compatibility, performance and other factors and work with a variety of designs. The server work is using pre-defined parts without that decision making process. But in both cases the job is just "plugging stuff in."
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I also forgot to mention that I need an old server removing from the rack, so you will probably want to add a bit on for that. If it sounds trivial, I should point out that it took our "engineer" about half-an-hour to get the rails out. Everyone seems to struggle with our rack.
This is pretty common. We've had many servers get "stuck" even in major datacenters. It really can take a while especially with older gear and older racks. But all the more reason to not pay IT staff to do manual labour work too. You can be the best IT person in the world and have no clue how to get things out of a rack or even be strong enough to lift a server. The skill of lifting a computer and putting rails on a rack is very different than that of IT and has crossovers with lots of other fields. Music equipment is racked the same way, for example, and some manufacturing equipment.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server:
And I would call him an engineer, regardless of what @scottalanmiller says. The hardest part of the last job was installing the SAS expander card. This is probably trivial once you've done it a couple of times, but our guy hadn't done one before and it did involve a call to HP for help. It seems to be a bit like putting an IKEA sofa
You wouldn't call someone a furniture engineer just because they assemble IKEA stuff, right? My wife doesn't call herself an engineer, but she does that all the time. The definition of engineer is that they design the systems, that's the English word definition, right from Cambridge. Someone that just "puts in a card" isn't designing anything. In fact, they aren't even doing IT work (at that moment), it's just manual labour in the bench space.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/11651/comparing-the-roles-of-engineer-and-administrator
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Great example came in today. Someone had a Dell server, four matching drives. The system arrived with no virtualization configured and the OS was installed without RAID on a single drive. Each drive was attached as an individual drive. Obviously Dell never intended someone to use the system like that, even for a desktop that's not an acceptable setup. It's pretty clear that it was just a test install to show that the hardware was working.
But several people said "but Dell set it up this way, obviously it is okay" and it has been running in production and is now a disaster.
