Comments for Vermyndax's Lair

Comment on Drobo Rebuild Time and Your Sanity by David

David — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:11:29 +0000

Can I just say that I wish I had found this site two weeks ago!! For the past six years I have been as happy as can be with my JBOD setup on Windows Server to store my pictures, movies and documents. I have a full managed Gigabit network and life was good.
Last week I fell for the beautiful looking Drobo Pro with so many cool features, at $1400 I was hoping for much more than just a pretty face. With Windows Home Server removing the Drive Extender feature, I was on the hunt for a device to utilize my various size/speed drives and be able to have some redundancy and peace of mind for my irreplaceable pictures. I didn’t want to go out and purchase a bunch of new drives for a real raid setup when I knew technology has to be good enough at this time to bring all of my existing drives into a harmonious volume. Let me tell you, I used it on USB as I was setting it up and it performed as your Drobo did years ago. (Hopefully you can tell me life DOES get better after a Drobo experience!) In Drobo’s defense the first four days using Iscsi on a dedicated GB NIC I was getting quite good speeds and was able to stream all of my content just fine.
Day five. After getting all of my pictures and videos “Moved” over. Since I was migrating all of my data to this safe new device, I had to get clever with moving data off each hard drive then popping it into the cool, no tool drive slots. I was getting gitty and excited like a little boy on Christmas morning as I saw the volume grow and feeling more and more at peace knowing that my data is now safe and secure using this professional device in a mere home environment. It is way overkill right for what I needed, but I couldn’t help it after reading all of Drobo’s literature on how great they think their products are. I have now enjoyed my experience so far, it brought all of my mismatched drives together, my data copied over quickly, I had a few days of peace of mind and really felt money well spent! I even let me Brother drool over my new purchase and was going to look into getting Him one for His home.
Day Six, Storm hits! Drobo informs me I have a drive failure, it was one of my 2TB drives. I’m thinking to myself no problem, this drive is less than a year old under warranty and this is a good experience, I will be left in awe of how great this product is, it gets to show me what it is made of, I will pop a new drive in and be grinning ear to ear! Because really, drives fail, this is what I forked out $1400, I was feeling lucky actually, like I was just in time! Even though I kept a backup with my old Jbod setup, this felt much better. I was sold that this sweet little device was going to show me how great it’s rebuild was going to be. I use raid at work all the time, it has a little more involvement in switching out the failed drive as you sometimes have to deal with drive enclosures or trays. I was so excited to see this sexy machine do it’s proprietary wonder! Remember, I migrated all of my data over and filled this beast up with drives. I completely trusted this company and this shiny Sh!t box with my years of pictures and family videos. I made the mistake of breaking the cardinal rule, the rule that I always tell family, clients, and friends NEVER to break! Never, Ever, Never, Ever keep your important files in one place or on one device! it will eventually fail!! and you will be out everything! But this couldn’t be my case could it? This is why I bought this, it really isn’t only one device…it has a proprietary raid-like algorithm that Drobo robotics has put to the test in every situation…right?? This baby has BEYONDRAID!! “Redundant Protection, No Headaches!” I even watched and fell for the Cali Lewis video, She made is sound so simple. She said ” it ALWAYS keeps your data safe and accessible!” Accessible…Safe….we will see.
So here I am, I added another drive. I have it set for Dual Disk Redundancy, I am going to be just fine….right Drobo? Hello Drobo? Where are you and where the hell is my data! My volume and mount is nowhere to be found. I did everything right…right?? I downloaded the latest drivers and firmware, I have the new dashboard, I am using Iscsi, dual redundant disks, professional hardware, what could there possibly be to worry about?? Well after trying everything, even having Microsoft Iscsi to reinitialize the session, rebooting the server, rebooting the drobo, reading articles on possible data corruption and fixes. I finally get it to see the drobo again, and my volume appears to be there now. My drive letter comes back up It is telling me it can’t protect me as it is rebuilding data, okay fine I will just let it finish. I didn’t even access the drobo, as I just wanted the damn array to rebuild quicker. I want all my green lights not to flash orange and green. The lovely dashboard tells me it will take 3400 hours to rebuild!! What!!!??? this has to be a mistake, I go to the dashboard again and think it must just have a glitch and it’s not responding, so I politely ask this robotic data wonder to restart itself. This will fix it, it has to, everything will be great! It seems I am trying to convince myself at this point…
Well it came back up and went from 3400 hours to 2600. I have now waited 48 hours and now it doesn’t show any hours, just the fact that data protection is in progress. I can’t access the volume, I want to just get my data off this POS and accessible again. I also don’t want to be jacked around like the last post, so I refuse to talk with incompetent people from a very misleading company about their inferior on the inside, pretty on the outside box that has turned me upside down. Needless to say, I am getting my data off this F’er and letting someone else have their way with it.
Just curious how many weeks, months, years…you had to wait to get it to rebuild itself?

Thanks for your site, I hope others will see this first before they become victims of shiny pretty things that will end up screwing them.

Comment on Backing up Snow Leopard Server with mlbackups by rtoads

rtoads — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:03:29 +0000

Example /etc/crontab entry for maclemon:

0 22 * * * root /usr/local/bin/mlbackup /etc/maclemon/backup/mlbackupconf

Compare that with the cryptic launchd entry required to do the same thing! (You’ll need to create the /etc/crontab file yourself)

One other thing: if vim is too complex for you, use pico. Also included in OS X.

Comment on Backing up Snow Leopard Server with mlbackups by rtoads

rtoads — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:00:06 +0000

Thanks for this tutorial. I’d like to point out that it’s still possible to use cron in OS X (even Lion, apparently) and avoid the complex and error-prone launchd configuration method. As you correctly state, “Launchd is a complex beast”. To that I’d add “needlessly complex”. Especially since cron does it all so cleanly and efficiently and has for decades.

I’ve read the theory behind the “need” for launchd but I’m entirely unconvinced it applies to 99% of users. Someone at Apple must concur, since cron continues to be quietly included in the OS.

Comment on Sequels by ssdbloke

ssdbloke — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:42:48 +0000

They film the sequels at the same time as the original – then put out the original – if it does well enough then they edit and finish the sequels – the industry does not care about quality of a 2nd, 3rd and 4th film – they know that people will watch them and so make money if the 1st one is a success.

Comment on Quick Apple Mail Fix for HTML font size by Vermyndax

Vermyndax — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:04:42 +0000

Sorry, Outlook for Mac is a completely different (and frustrating) animal.

Comment on Drobo Still Takes Forever to Rebuild? by patmuk

patmuk — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:16:42 +0000

Hi,

did anyone waited out the long rebuild process?
I had the same problem: Suddenly a drive failure occrred. As it was a 3TB disk, just purchased 3 month ago, and my SATA2USB could only recognize 800 MB (I have no desktop, only laptops), I could not check if it has really failed.
As I had still the warranty I replaced it without probs (thanks to WD) and replaced the brand new drive into the failed drives slot.

And then the rebuild process started …
Now it runs for about a month!
Some days ago, as the drive was not shown in the dashboard anymore, unplugged the drobo and switched it on again. It was recognized again (although with read-only access) and showed me 119 hours needed to rebuild. When I checked after roughly 4 days only 9 hours where remaining. But after about 3 hours it jumped up to more then 200 hours, currently reporting 218 hours

Is it worth waiting, will it successfully end? I am thinking to switch as well, found: http://frankleng.me/2010/05/01.....ete-guide/ quite attractive …

Comment on Quick Apple Mail Fix for HTML font size by john

john — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 04:55:36 +0000

Hi, Do you have a terminal command for Outlook for Mac 2011? I am still having unPrOFessionAL eMAil messages sent with varying font sizes. Also, when I backspace the font in the message body turns into Helvetica.

Comment on Fixing Mangled Contact Labels on iPhone by dtchild

dtchild — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:58:27 +0000

The final file that I do get in the output has no information in it. Any other hints?

Comment on Fixing Mangled Contact Labels on iPhone by dtchild

dtchild — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:57:55 +0000

hmmmm. Still did not work for me.

-bash: s/_??_//: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessPhone/Work/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessPhone2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessFax/Work: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessFax2/Work: No such file or directory
-bash: s/MobilePhone/Mobile/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/MobilePhone2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/EmailAddress1/Work/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/EmailAddress3/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomePhone/Home/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomeFax/Home: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomeFax2/Home: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Custom: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Work2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Work: No such file or directory
sed: option requires an argument — e

Comment on Fixing Mangled Contact Labels on iPhone by dogeared

dogeared — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:42:30 +0000

macsamurai: I had the same problem. The issue is with the “smart quotes” in the code above. Replace all occurences of:

‘

and

’

with:

‘