The Last Word

I called Drobo customer support. Actually, I called Drobo sales, since there doesn’t seem to be a separate customer support operation. The salesperson was very helpful. He said that normally they tell customers with disk failures to go to the manufacturer for replacements, but, since I’d had four out of five fail, he’d call the [...]

The new Drobo FS is indicating yet another hard drive failure, bringing the total to four out of five. I have loaded two more WD 2TB Caviar Green disks from my stock of spares, so I have three working disks at this point.
I’ll let you know how I make out with Drobo customer support tomorrow.

I’m just a glutton for punishment. Last week, I struggled with getting a USB-attached Drobo to allow a server to boot properly. Yesterday, I unpacked a new Drobo FS. I’d like to tell you about it.
The Drobo packing is not in the Apple league for style and elegance, but it’s darn good. They printed the [...]

This is a fascinating product. It’s probably the harbinger of a new highly useful class of devices between palmtops and notepads. Still, it is clearly a first generation gadget, with some annoying deficiencies.
It is already the best way to read books and periodicals. The Kindle iPad app is a nice piece of work, and gives [...]

Problem: server service hangs in Windows 2008 Server with Drobo attached. See previous post for background.
I called Drobo tech support. I explained the problem and immediately asked for escalation. The tech politely ignored that. As usual in conversations with Drobo, as with most tech support organizations, the first order of business was to bring all [...]

Warning: don’t bother to read this unless you care about the intricacies of Microsoft Server, or you are running a Drobo attached to one.
Last August, I began to have problems with my Windows 2008 server. After OS updating, Active Directory would stop working. I would take out the updates one of the time until it [...]

Did you ever play Myst? It was a 1990s-era computer game that took place on an island stocked with a bunch of strange machines that you had to figure out. The look of the machinery was that of top quality laboratory or industrial equipment from the 1890s. The overall effect was a weird combination of [...]

I took my new iPad to a meeting yesterday. An issue came up that made me want to look at an attachment to an old email. I whipped out the iPad and found the right folder, but the e-mail wasn’t there. In fact, I could find none of my old emails. When I got home, [...]

Years ago, when I was at Echelon, we worked with several PC manufacturers who had an acronym for the experience that the user had when setting up a computer for the first time: OOBE, pronounced to rhyme with “scoobie” (or, if you are an aging hippie, “doobie”). It stood for Out Of Box Experience. I [...]

…and that’s a good thing.
Many years ago, I turned around while I was sitting and pushed a Nikon FM off a bench. It fell about a foot to a stone patio, and the light meter never worked after that. A few years later, my wife set a 35 mm Minox down a little too hard [...]