Our technological lives are too complicated

This is the tale of two troubleshooting issues. One was easy the other was not.

I am usually good at problem solving. But the constant grind is wearing. I have to solve problems for my clients, friends and myself. I do that all day and night long, seemingly 7 days a week. It used to be exhilarating to find solutions. Now it is not. Too many puzzles, too frequently served. Too many applications, on too many operating systems, Mac and Windows, are taking their toll. 

Problem No. 1 – Google Calendar Sync not working

I had set up Google Calendar Sync for a client quite a while ago. We were syncing Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and to his BlackBerry. Everything worked fine for many months.

My client has had issues with the new BlackBerry Bold. Battery life could be better. It is too large and too different than the BlackBerry Curve he had owned and liked. He has gone through 3 or 4 Bold units in the last few months.

I received an email, after he got the latest Bold, that calendar syncing was broken. I sent him instructions for downloading and configuring Google Calendar Sync on his BlackBerry. But it still did not work.

Ironically, I was fortunate that his two year old Mac Pro suffered a hard drive failure that required me to replace the drive and reinstall/reconfigure the Mac Pro’s OS and software. I couldn’t get his mail applications to log into his Gmail account. I knew his credentials. They would not work. When I mentioned it to him, he said, “Oh, I changed my password.” Problem solved. He had not entered the correct password in Google Calendar Sync.

If I had not had to fix the Mac Pro I might have spent hours trying to find a solution for a problem that the client had inadvertently created. It is not his fault. We all have too many user names, user accounts, passwords, and security questions.

Problem No. 2 – Buffalo Linkstation not connecting

I have a new client, a commercial photography business. They have tens of thousands of photos, and add more every day. They wanted to upgrade their existing storage configuration. They used four Buffalo Linkstation NAS drives attached to an Ethernet switch on their LAN. The drives were almost full. There was no backup.

We agreed on repurposing an old Windows XP computer, adding an attached 4 bay eSATA drive enclosure as a file and backup server for the network. We also agreed on adding offsite drives to mirror the active data drives on the new server.

I replaced the existing router, switch and Ethernet connections for each of the company’s computers with Gigabit capable equipment. The old router had been a Linksys running at 10/100Mbps. The new one was a D-Link.

A problem arose immediately once the new network was in place. One of the four NAS drives did not appear on the network. We tried everything we could think of to recover that fourth NAS box. Of course, it was the most important of the four NAS devices and it was not a simple single drive configuration. It was two, half-terabyte drives ganged together using an internal RAID card to make one TB,

I spent a lot of time trying to coax that NAS drive back onto the network. I tried everything that I could think of. And then a light bulb went off in my head. It occurred to me that the NAS box might have been configured with a static IP rather than the default DHCP. Linksys routers generally use 192.168.1.x for their IP addresses. D-Link uses 192.168.0.x.

I fired up the old Linksys router, connected the NAS box and my ASUS Eee PC netbook. Sure enough the drive was now connected to the old network and functioning correctly. I opened its management console via a browser on the netbook and found that it had been configured for a static IP, 192.168.1.107, which would never work with the D-Link equipment, as configured. I set the NAS device to use DHCP and then reconnected it to the D-Link network. It showed up instantly. Problem solved.

If Buffalo designed their products with a reset button, back to factory defaults, like most routers have, I would have solved this problem with less headache and much faster.

Why do these problems arise? They arise from complexity. There are too many things we all have to know in order to make our equipment and applications work. It is not our fault that we are often at sea trying to coax our stuff to do what it is supposed to do. It is often the fault of the executives, designers and engineers who push out product without working hard enough to make it simple.