Sunday night I contacted Drobo’s support. I feel that my request was clearly written and conveyed my problem as well as I could. Here was my request:

My Drobo Share stopped working. My drobo (1st gen) still works fine when connected through USB, but will not show up in the Dashboard when connected to the Drobo Share. My Droboshare is getting an IP address and is responding to pings, and the drobo is showing the lights it would normally show when connected and disconnected. This Drobo has data that multiple computers need to access, and being usb-only for very long isn’t an option.

I got a reply with some good questions to help them troubleshoot my problem:

To help us track down what is happening with your Drobo, we will need you to check a few things.
Did you use any special characters like spaces, backslashes, hyphens or underscores in the name of your DroboShare?
Did you format your Drobo for 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16TB virtual volumes?
What is the part number (P/N) of your Drobo power supply?
Have you tried resetting your DroboShare back to factory defaults?
Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go then
Connect to Server?

Thank you,
Drobo Support – LG

So I replied:

Thank you for responding. Here are the answers to your questions:
My droboshare name is just drobo, no spaces or special characters
I have a 4TB HFS+ volume set up (and it is working properly via USB)
My power supply part number is GPD80-12-7A
I have tried resetting the droboshare to factory defaults with no success
I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the
run command from Windows.

Jeremy Dennis

At this point I was happy with their support. I probably should have mentioned what I had done to troubleshoot in my original request, but in my answers I assumed that they would have the information they needed. In particular, I was surprised they asked for the power supply model number. Was there a problem with power supplies causing this type of problem? I was optimistic that there might have been, and the problem would be a quick warranty replacement.

Boy, was I wrong.

Monday night I got a reply from Drobo Support:

Hello Jeremy Dennis,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

Put Drobo to standby
Wait 2 min the lights should go out (except the orange power LED)
Unplug the power from the Y-Cable (leave it plugged into the units)
Find and unroll a paperclip twice
Push in the rest button on the ethernet side of the DROBOSHARE.
While holding the reset button power the Y-Cable back up
Hold the reset until the Drive bays on the Drobo are solid green
Then let go and the share will be reset to default settings and should fix the issue.

Please reply to this e-mail and let us know if the issue is resolved.

Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support – JB

This set me off. Was I unclear in my previous e-mail? Did I not say that I had tried to reset the Drobo Share? I probably shouldn’t have replied right away, but I was so incensed that I couldn’t stop myself:

Drobo Support,
Is anyone even reading the past history on this ticket? I mentioned in
my last e-mail that I did already reset my drobo share. You asked me
specific questions to help troubleshoot the issue, and I answered
them. Now the reply is to do something that I already said that I did?
This is a very stressful and frustrating situation for me and to make
sure that everything is clear, I will repeat my problem, as well as
your questions and my answers from the previous e-mails so everything
will be easily understood to the next person to receive this support
ticket.

My original support request:
My Drobo Share stopped working. My drobo (1st gen) still works fine
when connected through USB, but will not show up in the Dashboard when
connected to the Drobo Share. My Droboshare is getting an IP address
and is responding to pings, and the drobo is showing the lights it
would normally show when connected and disconnected. This Drobo has
data that multiple computers need to access, and being usb-only for
very long isn’t an option.

My reply from “Drobo Support – LG” and my answers (prefixed by >):

To help us track down what is happening with your Drobo, we will need
you to check a few things.
Did you use any special characters like spaces, backslashes, hyphens
or underscores in the name of your DroboShare?

> My droboshare name is just drobo, no spaces or special characters

Did you format your Drobo for 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16TB virtual volumes?

> I have a 4TB HFS+ volume set up (and it is working properly via USB)

What is the part number (P/N) of your Drobo power supply?

> My power supply part number is GPD80-12-7A

Have you tried resetting your DroboShare back to factory defaults?

> I have tried resetting the droboshare to factory defaults with no success

Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go
then Connect to Server?

> I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.

As I mentioned before, I really need to access my Drobo over the
network for access from multiple computers and right now I’m unable
to. This is very stressful for me. Please help me resolve this
problem.

Thank you,

Jeremy Dennis

I know that was a little over the top, but I wanted to make sure that there was no way that anyone could misunderstand my problem and what I had done so far to troubleshoot it. I’ve worked in tech support for almost 10 years. I know what help desk systems are like. They all have a history of correspondence between the user and the technician, and these e-mails all have text in the subject line with the ticket number and codes for the help desk system to pick up and import into the ticket. I knew all this information was already in their system, but what harm could come from having it in there twice?

Apparently twice wasn’t enough:

Hello Jeremy Dennis,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

Apologies we sent the reset instructions because if not done to how it was typed it will not reset the Droboshare. Assuming the Droboshare is reset you should be able to access the Droboshare via

go~connect to server~ type SMB://Droboshare/Drobo (replace Drobo with the volume name. Leave Droboshare the same as the name will be reset)

Also please check your computers Firewall(s) (OS and 3rd party) have exceptions for the Drobodashboard.exe

Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support – JB

Ignoring the fact that he’s mixing up OSX and Windows terminology (“connect to server” line and “drobodashboard.exe”), was this also not covered in the previous e-mails? Let’s look up a bit and see.

Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go then Connect to Server?

> I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.

It appears that I had covered that bit. My thinking now is that “JB” from Drobo support isn’t very good with reading the whole e-mail. That is only way I can see this happening without really getting mean about it. Once again I replied without giving myself time to relax and sent this off:

Drobo Support,

Once again, this is something I have already covered in my previous
answers. You asked: “Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on
DroboShare by using Go
then Connect to Server?” I replied: “I cannot connect to it manually
via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.” As I
said in my previous e-mail, resetting my Drobo Share did not allow me
to connect to the Drobo. There have been no changes to the computer’s
firewall settings since the problems started, and the firewall was
already off.

This is absurd. Every e-mail is asking things that have already been
asked by someone else and answered by me. This is extremely
frustrating, especially for a product as expensive as the Drobo and
Drobo Share.

Jeremy Dennis

We’ll see what happens. I am close to calling, but Drobo provides a support request form. It “should” work through this method. I really like my Drobo, and for a product that costs as much as it does, I would have expected better support. I’m hoping I don’t have a $199 doorstop. I will update this as this saga continues to unfold.

The hardest part of this process was to figure out how to get my addresses out of Exchange and into the Address Book application on my Mac. When you delete the contact syncing on the phone it removes them from the device, so syncing the contacts from the phone into Address Book was out of the question. There’s no good mass “export from outlook” and “import into Address Book” option either. My solution actually came from Entourage, proving that it is actually good for something. Entourage has the ability to sync with the local iApps, and it worked out really well. As you can see you can sync calendars and notes as well, but I only chose the addresses as I didn’t need notes and my calendar was already synced.

For Calendar syncing, I discovered BusySync. It can sync my Google Calendar with iCal, and include the multiple calendars I subscribe to as well. BusySync costs $25, but is well worth it. Updates to any of the calendars are quick as long as it’s running.

If that were all I needed, then I would be done with the only cost being the $25 for BusySync. However, to sync with my iPhone I had to pay for MobileMe. I got it with my new Mac for $79, and you can get it from Amazon at that same price. MobileMe syncs my local addresses and calendars with their servers as well as between their servers and my iPhone. I was hesitant at first after hearing horror stories when it launched, however I haven’t had a single problem with the syncing. Updates are fairly quick from phone to MobileMe, and from MobileMe to iCal.

It is frustrating to have to use two applications to get all my services synced, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I use Thunderbird, iCal, and Address book on my Mac, Gmail and Google Calendar on the web, or my iPhone when I’m running around and everything is up to date.

Some people at work used the betas of Entourage 2008 and I had hope for the new version. Anything would be better than Entourage 2004. Last week I decided to use Entourage for a full week. Trying to use Entourage was an exercise in futility. I prefer to live in the “Unread” mail view with my e-mail clients, and Entourage 2008 was like 2004 in the time it took to customize it to only show incoming mail. When most people want to see unread mail, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to see mail in the “Sent Items” or “Junk Mail” folders.

Outlook has had a great feature since at least 2003 where you can drag an e-mail over the calendar or tasks button and it will open a new calendar entry or task with the contents of the e-mail as the basis of the new entry. This comes in handy and is a time saver I’ve really gotten used to. Entourage does not have this feature. Despite the feature being around for 5 years, Microsoft didn’t include it Entourage 2008. I don’t see why they wouldn’t try and make the two products a little more similar. At least take the better features of both and integrate them to make a better product. Speaking of tasks, Entourage doesn’t pick up Tasks from Exchange either.

The deal killer for me was when I opened up Outlook yesterday and my wife called to ask why she was suddenly getting some e-mails I automatically forward to her. It was then I realized that Entourage doesn’t get the list of Outlook rules from Exchange. I have rules set up to organize my mailbox and I didn’t realize that they weren’t being filtered as they should have been.

The other Office apps are fine for my basic editing, but for any intensive work, I’m opening up Parallels and going to 2007. It’s nice being able to use the best tools from both Windows and OSX at the same time.

Tags: Windows, Mac, OSX, Office 2008, Office 2007, Entourage, Parallels, review, technology, Exchange