mcbeen.com

Got a response back yesterday and as expected it was amazing. Well… I might as well through the entire mail sequence.

2004-05-19
>Ben
>send the log. Because if there is less the 10 errors within a given
>time thats normal and well within specs. thats why it is ECC . Thank
>you for using Dell’s online support for Workstations/Servers.

Now, I was a little taken aback by this. ECC memory is there to PREVENT CRASHES of applications and data corruption caused by memory errors. It IS NOT there to give Dell an excuse not to replace my RAM. It’s as bad as Sony! So, I took the exported log file that the Dell open manmanage system generated, and attached it to the reply. I get this later in the day.

2004-05-19
> the logfile sent is unreadable. all i see if a bunch of number and
>letter strings. Try and resend it using TXT format .. that should
>work..david

Now, keep in mind that I sent them their log file directly exported from open manage. they export a ZIP file, not a txt file. when you attach a zip file, it gets MIME encoded as base-64 so the smtp gateways can handle the binary transfer. He got it, and couldn’t figure out what it was. I’m getting tech support on a SERVER from a guy who doesn’t understand EMAIL! I know the attachment was ok because I extracted it on my side and opened it from his replay :-).
So. He wanted a plain text version of the log. This is a problem. When I unzipped the log, it is html. lots-o-html. Why would the export html if they want txt? Go figure… oh yea… this is Dell! Frustrated, I just cut and pasted the entire rendered page into a text email. My email program through out the tables and formatting, and I ended up with a rather jumbled mess of log entries. I didn’t feel like repaginating, so I just hit send. I got this yesterday.

2004-05-20
>Ben,
>Swapping the ram seems to have make the issue follow the stick of
>ram since the error are consistent with 1 stick at a time . I
>will go ahead and ship out 4sticks and make sure we cover
>all bases. They will be there friday morning and the ref. number is
>xxxxxxxxx

4 Sticks…. that’s wierd. I only have 2 in the machine. Hmmm… I hope they are the right size. Oh well. If they aren’t, we’ll try again. You have to be patient with these guys. It is currently 1:11 pm, and the sticks are not here yet. Looks like we will continue play on Monday.