[asterisk-users] Dell Servers

[Remco Barendse]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Eric Rousse wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was planning on getting a Dell PowerEdge 2950 for our new Asterisk 
> configuration.
> But while searching for documentation about it and/or reported issues, I 
> found this:
>
> http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+hardware
> WARNING - many Dell motherboards use the e1000 gigabit ethernet chipset, 
> which has been known to cause random locksup - if you plan on using a Dell 
> server, disable the onboard controller and purchase an addon ethernet card.
>
> Does anyone has real experience ?

I bought a Dell 2850 as a pbx server and it just sucks IMHO

The stupid thing has only 3 pci slots and even with only 3 pci slots Dell 
managed to have a shared irq on every slot, 1 for the scsi controller and 
one for each nic

The result of this 'nice' piece of work is dreadfull irq hit/miss results 
in zttest, it barely meets the minimum requirement and i do get complaints 
of dropped calls on my pri

I need to pass some options to the kernel at boot time to improve things, 
without extra options the results from zttest were unacceptable

My spare pbx is a lowly Athlon XP 2600 with an Asus A7V8X-X mobo in it and 
it's scores with zttest are considerably better (but not full 100% hits)

I know that everybody on the list will now start recommending me to buy 
Sangoma hardware but firstly I hate compiling extra modules and it doesn't 
make it right that the Dell hardware just sucks