AppleDoesCare

I was poised to write a nasty blog about the problem below, but I counted to 10. I'm really glad I did, because when I don't give myself time to cool down I make a bigger-than-normal ass out of myself. Fortunately, I found out that Apple really does care about my problems (at least they seemed to after the nasty note I sent to THEM). Anyhow, I did get a satisfactory answer from them instead of the usual curt "you'll have to call AppleCare", and thus I didn't have to entitle this entry AppleDontCare.....


Problem: I had a drive go bad in a Macintosh Xserve RAID array. This had happened before and it wasn't a big deal at the time because the equipment was under warranty, and all that was needed was a simple call to AppleCare. That time, a technician showed up in a few days, slid the new drive into the array and the array rebuilt itself. This time, now that our AppleCare agreement is expired, I can't make that simple call, so I had to find my own solution. (Interlude: Apple doesn't extend their service contracts. I guess they'd rather not be in the repair business if they don't have to. Hey, who can blame them if they can get us to just buy new stuff when the service agreement runs out?). When the AppleCare agreement ran out, it was difficult to find anyone who knew anything about Apple server equipment, let alone anyone who would sign a service agreement. But Apple told me they would be glad to drop-ship any parts I needed in the future. Yeah, I bet they would be glad; check their prices! Anyhow, this is fine as long as you can figure out which part you need. So, when the drive failed, I logged onto our friendly Apple Store and found that the price of a replacement drive would be $499.00 ............................................[audible gulp]. Okay, next stop was Weirdstuff.com, where I found a viable replacement drive for $49.95. Guess which one I chose. So, the drive from Weirdstuff didn't have the fancy carrier for inserting the drive into the RAID device, but I was willing to put the new drive into the old carrier to save $450. Besides, I was getting a replacement drive with exactly the same part number, from the original manufacturer (Hitachi). What could possibly go wrong? Well, the bottom line is that it didn't work in the array. The drive was fine; I had no trouble initializing it and partitioning it any way I wanted, and I tried it many different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the Xserve RAID device to recognize the drive. RAID Admin would only report "Not installed", like it wasn't even there. After a couple weeks of total frustration, I checked the drive specs on the paper label for the 10th time, and compared it to the original drive. I noticed that the original drive had 251GB of space while the new drive specified 250GB. This rang a bell from the past; somewhere it's written that "when replacing a drive in a RAID array you must use a drive of the same size or larger". Could 1GB difference on a drive with exactly the same part number possibly cause the drive to be not recognized and be reported as "Not installed"? (I know this is a long story but I really need to practice being verbose for my up-coming novel. So, please bear with me; we're finally getting to the real problem). I had no one to ask about this. I had never found anyone who knew anything about Apple Server technology. I couldn't call Weirdstuff; there was absolutely nothing wrong with their replacement drive; I could prove that 7 different ways. I couldn't call Apple; well, I could call Apple and get rejected by the AppleCare agreement cops; I'd been down that road before. At this point you might say I should have ordered the $499 drive from Apple..... (Well, I thought about it; for maybe a nanosecond). Then I tried an old Apple technical contact, but didn't get an answer. I finally bit the bullet and called the Apple Sales Rep. A few terse notes went back and forth, and I could see my question going nowhere. I was caught in the old no-we-won't-extend-your-AppleCare-agreement-but-you-must-call-AppleCare-with-a-valid-agreement-number-before-we-will-talk-to-you, Catch-22.

Solution: That's when I finally snapped and wrote the nasty note to Apple. I really hate to call this the "solution" but this is what it took to get people to listen. It's unfortunate that we have to get so angry before someone realizes that we need help. In this case, several people jumped to my rescue, including a very knowledgeable Apple SE. He must have seen the problem before; he was very quick to confirm that the 1GB difference was enough to cause the disk drive to be unrecognizable and for RAID Admin to report it as "Not installed". One simple thing could have averted this entire fiasco: instead of the non-specific message "Not installed", perhaps RAID Admin could have looked at the drive and determined that there was not enough space and said something like, "Get a bigger disk drive, DUMB ASS"!! This might not have made me feel any better but it would have been a hell of a lot quicker.

How To Support Vista

Problem: With Vista now on the streets, users are starting to ask almost every day, "Okay, what's this Vista all about? What do we get with it? When are we going to install it?"; the usual questions following the hype of a new product. Well, I've been putting them off because I haven't even had a chance to try it yet myself. Until this week, I didn't think I'd be ready to do anything with Vista for a loooong time ...............

Solution: I had the great opportunity to attend Mark Minasi's 2-day Vista support class. Mark pointed out all of the good, bad and ugly features we needed to get started with supporting Vista. It was not only informative; it was the most entertaining technical discussion I've ever attended! Just where does he get his energy? If you look to the right, you'll see that I have also added a link to Minasi.com, for future browsing.

Thanks, Mark!

Windows\CSC Directory

Problem: The user reported that she could no longer print on her machine.

Solution: I found that the C: drive was completely full, so that the spooling function couldn't allocate temporary space for printing. I moved 26 GB of data (which was all in My Documents) to a network drive; washed my hands and went home. The next week I found that the C: drive was completely full again. This time the space was taken up by the Windows\CSC directory. It was using 26 GB of space (hmmm, sounds familiar). The Windows\CSC dir is a hidden system directory created to keep a cached copy of offline files (Client Side Caching). Moving the data to the network drive apparently turned on the Offline Files option. To remedy the problem, I turned off the the Offline Files capability (tools menu/folder options.../Offline Files tab/unchecked Enable Offline Files). I then deleted all subfolders in the Windows\CSC directory. I checked the machine again the next day and all seemed well. As always, my fingers are crossed ........