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On 03/09/2021 12:44, fraser kendall wrote:
Dell T7810
Nice: Dell Precision T-series are 'proper' workstations and they're built and run like tanks. Very much my cup of tea, nice acquisition.
I'll try and answer more generally with how I'd handle one of those rolling up on my doorstep and please ask again about anything specific I miss.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/product-support/product/precision-t7810-workstation/driversThat's an older - but still supported - system so if you order that by date release you'll see that Dell have pretty much stopped releasing upgrades for it by now. Just a single release this year and only a single BIOS upgrade in 2020 so it's in full maintenance mode with Dell only releasing presumably security critical patches every now and then.
This is good news from your perspective as unlike a brand new Dell you'll have virtually no new firmware or BIOS upgrades to worry about - I'd simply use the existing Windows 10 system that comes with it to install Dell Support Assist and do a single pass to flash it to current once and then bookmark the above link to the Dell page. That's you basically done for firmware updating for the lifetime of the machine.
With that out of the way, google how to extract the license key of your Win10 install with a powershell one-liner, write it down and then blow windows away forever on the bare metal... unless you specifically want or need a bare metal windows installation. In which case nuke the existing one for obvious reasons, grab a clean ISO from Microsoft and reinstall to a separate SSD or NVME drive reusing your valid Pro key. Don't arse about with partitioning single drives, it's a workstation and drives are cheap: each OS gets it own drive.
That being said I categorically would run that box on linux: it's super well supported, has tons of power and you're already thinking of using Qemu/KVM for VMs anyway. Just go that route if you need Windows.
Make sure the system is setup correctly in it's BIOS. Enable all the latest UEFI + secureboot options. Dell Pro systems have *very* comprehensive UEFI/BIOS setups with every option you can imagine available so spend a while combing through it to familiarise yourself with it fully. It's easy to miss things defaulting to weird values like memory timings. Workstation firmware defaults are usually setup to quite conservative values and can often tolerate a fair bit of tweaking.
Finally if you got one with a HBA then watch out for it - it might have a Dell PERC or a LSI unit and not all HBAs are created equal. Generally speaking unless you got one that can be easily reflashed to IT mode you'll be better off ignoring it and using the normal SATA backplanes to attach your disks.
Anyway have fun, that's a cool machine! You might want to replace the fans with some more modern quiet ones as well especially if they've never been replaced and are getting old. Workstations can be noisy...
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