Very frustrating tech support (15682575)

from what i can see your case has been worked on on jun 6, 7, 8,9 and 11 (today). the only day it hasnt been worked on was jun 10th. i wouldnt exactly call this poor service at all.

While the effort they have expended so far has not solved the problem does not mean you have not gotten good support. Some problems do not have an easy solution.

Guys - just my opinion but i don't think the last 2 comments are particularly helpful, and may even antagonise further a clearly frustrated customer.

If I look at the feedback given to the OP, have to say that even though I consider myself reasonably experienced with ReadyNAS devices, much of the feedback isn't exactly clear, and would, particularly if I was a new user, cause me to be concerned about trusting a device that can suffer such a signficant software failure. Also the seeming to bounce around between different support agents - not something a customer needs to see even if it is necessary for Netgear to do - only causes further unnecessary concern and frustration.

I'm not contesting at all that the Support team is working hard on this, but when a customer has a serious problem like this and is worried - getting the communication right (clear, concise, relevant and timely) is as important as the support of the technical issue itself. With that in mind, rather than telling a customer he is wrong and, in effect, should be appreciating the support he is getting, or the seemingly slow resolution to the problem is in part his own fault for not having an additional backup just doesn't seem appropriate to me. It would be far better if someone from Netgear directly involved in the case could just keep him a little better informed - and a far more convincing way of showing the good support that is claimed.

Just my $0.02 that probably counts for nothing - but I hope someone involved in the case does get to read this.

when i look at the case, i can see regular work and communication with the customer ever since the case was escalated.

i really dont see how support could have kept him any better informed.

beisser wrote:
when i look at the case, i can see regular work and communication with the customer ever since the case was escalated. i really dont see how support could have kept him any better informed.

I can only go on the feedback in this thread, and the impression I get is that the customer does not view the communication as adequate

Point taken.

Hi JamesHaskell - I'm sorry about the experience that you had, we do work hard to try to provide excellent support. I really appreciate your detailed feedback showing line-items of the issues that you have had. I will take that feedback and try to incorporate it into improving our support process.

It does looks like the issue that you ran into is rather unique - I'm afraid it may have been compounded by some of our otherwise standard troubleshooting processes. I'll work on my side to get to the root of the issue itself, and then to refine the troubleshooting process to accomodate for such situations.

Please let us know if you see continued issues.

Things are better!! As of last Friday, it appears the system is back up and running properly. Also on Friday, a new tech support person (Josh Jones) started with working with me. He has been very helpful. Here's my last email exchange with him from this morning.
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Josh:

Thank you so much for this report. I really appreciate it. You have been tremendous to work with.

I ran the disk test as we discussed yesterday, and I presume it ran OK... the system apparently rebooted itself as you said it would around 10:42 last night, and is back up and running. There is nothing in the FrontView status log about the disk test... there is just a single entry saying "System is up". So "no news is good news"? Everything is OK on the drives?

Thanks again Josh. Like I said, you have been fantastic - by far the best person I have spoken to and worked with at NetGear. You have been very helpful, you've followed up when you said you would, and your thorough research and explanation of this issue has greatly eased my mind about the reliability of my ReadyNAS. Could I please get contact information for your supervisor? I want to encourage them to not only recognize you, but to work to get your colleagues up to your level. All of the other tech support personnel I dealt with on this issue were very disappointing compared to you:
1. Most seemed to be off my time-zone (Phillipines?), so every little step took at least a day.
2. English is not their first language. There were communication problems.
3. I had no visibility to my case notes. This is a BIG issue... much of my frustration was due to a lack of proactive communication from NetGear. If I could have accessed the case notes on-line and seen progress, it would not have been so frustrating. As it was, it seemed like days would go by with no apparent progress.
4. You are by far the most knowledgeable person I spoke with. Your explanations and requests were clear, as demonstrated in your email below.
5. You were sympathetic and apologized to me. You empathized with me. Nobody else did.
6. You were prompt. You got back to me quickly with this full report.

Once again, great job. It has been a pleasure working with you.

James



On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Josh Jones <jjones@netgear.com> wrote:

Hi James,



In taking a look through the configuration on the NAS, everything does seem to be in-place. Even the more-tricky hard-linking of 64-bit FS tools seems to have been done correctly – which is a good sign.



Regarding the events that led-up to the issue, it looks like here’s what happened (leaving out some details that do not appear to have directly affected the issue, such as reboots etc):

1. Communication to/from disk 1 was lost. Disk 1 was kicked from the active RAID arrays (there are three arrays, the OS, swap and data array).

2. The chassis was replaced, disks 2-4 were put into the replacement unit and the unit was booted.

3. After the boot was successful, disk 1 was re-added and synced successfully, however, it appears that critical RAID superblock data was not written correctly to the OS and swap arrays on the disk. This may have been the “homehost” information which would link the RAID superblocks to the MAC address of the NAS.

4. About 12 hours later, communication to/from disk 4 was lost. It was kicked from the active RAID arrays.

5. A subsequent reboot caused the unit to boot with the impression that disk 1’s OS and swap arrays were not synced, and disk 4 was out of sync in general. This caused the both drives to appear as dead.

6. Throughout subsequent reboots, drive 4’s data array resync’d and updated correctly, but both drive 1 and 4’s OS and swap array information would not persist across reboots, causing them to appear as dead each time.

7. Support manually recreated theses arrays, erasing configuration. This ensured that the drives would be assembled into the array at boot.

8. During the subsequent manual rebuild of the OS, a necessary file (/etc/hostname) was not created/configured.

9. Upon creating that file, everything appears to be functioning.



If this is accurate, for the most part, then the following actions will need to be taken (I am working on doing these now):

1. The original issue of disk 1 showing as dead may have been caused by the auto-spindown setting. I’d recommend running a ‘Disk Test’ from the boot menu on the NAS as a precaution, but in the meantime I will try to get a hold of this drive model and experiment with the auto-spindown feature. While this is part of our standard qualification procedure, it’s possible that the combination of events that led-up to the failure were not experienced during testing.

2. I will try to reproduce the issue where the OS/swap arrays are not updated correctly, causing disks to appear as dead upon reboot.

3. I will notify support on the best practice for rebuilding the OS so as to preserve the configuration whenever possible.



As per our phone conversation, I’ll also put-in a feature request to create a Time Machine backup job option. Also, here is a link that discusses how to set-up ReadyNAS Remote so that the ReadyNAS can easily be accessed through a secure VPN tunnel by clients that are not on the same LAN:

http://www.readynas.com/?cat=52



Please let me know if there are any questions/concerns.



Thanks!

- Josh

Just had ANOTHER disk failure... on the phone AGAIN with support. I have wasted so much time on this NAS...

Well, if the volume is healthy, you should not have any problems replacing the disk with a suitable replacement. We do suffer disk failures from time to time. If the volume is healthy and no other disks are about to fail, it is a matter of hot pulling the failing/failed disk and hot adding the replacement. So far, I have lost one disk over four years on my NV+ and three disks over two NVX units over the last year. I have RMA'ed each, and Seagate has promptly sent me a replacement on the first two. I have one that SeaTools for DOS has repaired, and one I have to RMA (it failed Saturday).

Just to cover the bases, it sure wouldn't hurt to make sure your backup is current. Then if a second drive fails while synching the replacement, you will be covered.