Anecdotally, this reminds me of a terrible experience with some Dell hardware back around 2011. I volunteered to do an installation of some hardware in a POP ca

Anecdotally, this reminds me of a terrible experience with some Dell hardware back around 2011. I volunteered to do an installation of some hardware in a POP cage at one of the London UK colos. Hardware arrived a day or two late, got it unpacked and carted upstairs. Spent a few days installing it (had to build a deployment environment on my Mac in a VM because the servers had no CDROM drive, only NetBoot and USB; our centralised imaging system hadn't been built with "installs outside of core DC network" in mind). Discovered that the machines had been ordered with iDRACs, not DRACs. Damn things did not work until the box was booted into Linux and a driver to interface/activate the board was loaded. This, of course, worked wonderfully when the kernel locked up with a panic. The machines were being used to test custom kernel modifications. Panics and lockups were common. Every time it happened, the engineers in the US had to ask "smart hands" to go reset the machine in the cage. Experiment was a success though. Turned into the foundation for how a very large edge network was built.