a blog on technology in the real world

It’s been about a week now since I’ve had my replacement DroboShare, and it’s working perfectly. I have to say that once I got to the escalated support the experience was much better. The tech sent me the DroboShare, it arrived quickly, and just worked. One thing I’ve noticed is that it shows up as “Droboshare” on my network, while the old one showed up as “Drobo.” I don’t know if this is a different hardware revision, but they were labeled the same and also have the same firmware versions.

It’s pretty clear that my problems started when I was playing with Drobo Apps and the Droboshare got bricked. I haven’t yet re-installed any of the apps, and will be very careful when I do.

Apple released iPhone firmware version 2.2 today along with iTunes 8.0.2. The iPhone firmware brings a lot of anticipated updates and features, including Google Street View, public transit and walking directions to the Google Maps application, downloadable podcasts, and the ability to disable auto-correction when typing. A lot will be made about the continued lack of copy and paste, which Apple continues to ignore. I chose to focus on what is in there, and the additions to Google Maps and the podcast downloading make my life a lot easier. Read more

I’ve been using a Drobo and Drobo Share since July. For those that don’t know, Drobo is an enclosure that accepts up to four SATA drives, and uses a proprietary RAID-like technology to make the drives appear as one drive to the operating system. Unlike RAID you don’t have to use identical drives, and the Drobo indicates when it’s almost full. When that happens, the smallest capacity drive can be replaced with a larger one and overall capacity is increased. Drobo Share is a network attachment that turns the Drobo into a NAS device. It’s been working fine until this past weekend when I noticed I couldn’t connect from my Mac. The lights on the Drobo appeared normal, and I could ping the IP for the Drobo Share. I tried all the troubleshooting options on the Drobo support site, including restoring the Drobo Share to defaults using a paperclip, but nothing worked. The Drobo itself is fine and still works over USB, so it was a relief that no data was lost. The Drobo Share appears to be dead though.

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