tech support hell
Apr. 2nd, 2005 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrI bought a Linksys NSLU2 the other day. Nice gizmo. Lets you hook one or two USB drives to your LAN as shared storage *and* lets you share them over the web if you like.
The saga begins...
First annoyance was that it wants to reformat the drives to its own format. So I had to spend a *lot* of hours backing up the 80 gig USB drive.
Then I get it attached (you have to power down to attach or remove drives).
I get the unit configured to an address on my LAN and change its name (it defaults to LKGxxxxxx where xxxxxx is the last 6 digits of the MAC address). And change the workgroup name to match the rest of my computers. Finally, I tell it to format the drive.
Remarkably, formatting the drive doesn't take too long. Obviously not a "low level" format.
Now, I go to set up files and stuff. I've got two choices. When I look at it on the "computers in my workgroup" I see the unit under the name I gave it. Clicking on that gives me "ADMIN 1" and "DISK 1".
Now, tell me, fellow geeks and users? would *you* copy the files from the backup to ADMIN 1? Or to DISK 1?
Yeah. Me too. I copied them to DISK 1. Took *hours* (well, the last directory is still getting copied, actually).
Then I tried creating some users and shares so certain friends could use the web interface to get files from me easily. This is where things started going wrong.
When you create a share you can either take the default,. which creates a folder of that name in the drive's root directory (so sayeth the docs). Or you can specify a path which will create a "folder" if it doesn't already exist.
So I specified one of the directories that was already copied. And created a group (remote) with access to that share. And created accounts for a couple of friends to test things.
And then the fun began. The screen you get when you connect via a browser has "User Log in (Private Data)", "DISK 1(Public Data)" and "DISK 2(Public Data)" as choices.
Since there's no disk 2, that option is black and can't be chosen.
Selecting DISK 1 got everything that I'd uploaded to the drive. Not good.
Logging in got the share group, but no files under it.
After much futzing around, I gave up and went for Linksys's Livechat online tech support. The first tech hung up on me after a bit.
I did a bit more digging while waiting for another tech. And found that my attempts to make a share for /mp3 were creating a folder in ADMIN 1...
I spent at least an hour and a half online with the tech going thru various things, including long waits while he spoke to a "senior tech".
Which lead to responses such as this:
Sorry to keep you wating. I was verifying this to one
of the senior techs. Actually sir, folder and files will be saved in the
in the user or shared folders that you created in the NSLU2. So if you
will transfer a folder to the NSLU2, it will be save to the created user
or shared folder and not creating the exact file/folder.
To which my response was, understandably "Huh?"
*Very* much later, while waiting for a response, I had a thought... some tests confirmed it.
"ADMIN 1" was all files & directories on drive 1 (which is referred to as "Disk 1" in the location selection box on the share creation menu). "DISK 1" was all files and directories in the /public directory of drive 1.
Note that the *opnly* way to get a "raw" view of drive 1 is by looking in "ADMIN 1" from the "network places" on the PC.
A couple of lines in the docs explaining ADMIN 1 and DISK 1 that way woul;d have saved me hours. As would choosing better names for them.
btw, I'm certain that these techs were somewhere not in the US. Besides that first example, I also had the tech asking if I was "filling up" the fields in the share creation menu.
And this example:
"Shared do only apply on Disk 1"
Anybody want to tell me what the hell *that* is supposed to mean?
Thankfully, I was able to move the directories out of /public and into root rather than having to delete and recopy. So all is well, except for my frustration level.
The saga begins...
First annoyance was that it wants to reformat the drives to its own format. So I had to spend a *lot* of hours backing up the 80 gig USB drive.
Then I get it attached (you have to power down to attach or remove drives).
I get the unit configured to an address on my LAN and change its name (it defaults to LKGxxxxxx where xxxxxx is the last 6 digits of the MAC address). And change the workgroup name to match the rest of my computers. Finally, I tell it to format the drive.
Remarkably, formatting the drive doesn't take too long. Obviously not a "low level" format.
Now, I go to set up files and stuff. I've got two choices. When I look at it on the "computers in my workgroup" I see the unit under the name I gave it. Clicking on that gives me "ADMIN 1" and "DISK 1".
Now, tell me, fellow geeks and users? would *you* copy the files from the backup to ADMIN 1? Or to DISK 1?
Yeah. Me too. I copied them to DISK 1. Took *hours* (well, the last directory is still getting copied, actually).
Then I tried creating some users and shares so certain friends could use the web interface to get files from me easily. This is where things started going wrong.
When you create a share you can either take the default,. which creates a folder of that name in the drive's root directory (so sayeth the docs). Or you can specify a path which will create a "folder" if it doesn't already exist.
So I specified one of the directories that was already copied. And created a group (remote) with access to that share. And created accounts for a couple of friends to test things.
And then the fun began. The screen you get when you connect via a browser has "User Log in (Private Data)", "DISK 1(Public Data)" and "DISK 2(Public Data)" as choices.
Since there's no disk 2, that option is black and can't be chosen.
Selecting DISK 1 got everything that I'd uploaded to the drive. Not good.
Logging in got the share group, but no files under it.
After much futzing around, I gave up and went for Linksys's Livechat online tech support. The first tech hung up on me after a bit.
I did a bit more digging while waiting for another tech. And found that my attempts to make a share for /mp3 were creating a folder in ADMIN 1...
I spent at least an hour and a half online with the tech going thru various things, including long waits while he spoke to a "senior tech".
Which lead to responses such as this:
Sorry to keep you wating. I was verifying this to one
of the senior techs. Actually sir, folder and files will be saved in the
in the user or shared folders that you created in the NSLU2. So if you
will transfer a folder to the NSLU2, it will be save to the created user
or shared folder and not creating the exact file/folder.
To which my response was, understandably "Huh?"
*Very* much later, while waiting for a response, I had a thought... some tests confirmed it.
"ADMIN 1" was all files & directories on drive 1 (which is referred to as "Disk 1" in the location selection box on the share creation menu). "DISK 1" was all files and directories in the /public directory of drive 1.
Note that the *opnly* way to get a "raw" view of drive 1 is by looking in "ADMIN 1" from the "network places" on the PC.
A couple of lines in the docs explaining ADMIN 1 and DISK 1 that way woul;d have saved me hours. As would choosing better names for them.
btw, I'm certain that these techs were somewhere not in the US. Besides that first example, I also had the tech asking if I was "filling up" the fields in the share creation menu.
And this example:
"Shared do only apply on Disk 1"
Anybody want to tell me what the hell *that* is supposed to mean?
Thankfully, I was able to move the directories out of /public and into root rather than having to delete and recopy. So all is well, except for my frustration level.
