Seagate FreeAgent Go Review

I recently purchased a couple of the Seagate FreeAgent Go 160Gb external drives. A local store had a good deal on them. Here are a couple of my observations. The drive is in a very sleek case. I like the black with the yellow light on it. The case is plastic, but seems pretty sturdy. Oddly, there is no ventilation in the case that I can see. The plastic gets a little warm, but does not seem excessive. The drive has a weird USB cable. Plug one end into the drive, the other end splits and has two USB connectors for your computer. I called Seagate and asked why two and do they both have to be hooked up. Their support said the two connectors are to help with getting power on some systems. If the drive works ok with just one of the USB connectors plugged in, then they said that is fine. I guess since there is no external power supply, that is their way of working around getting enough power.

 I also tested out their FreeAgent sync software. This is very important – do not use this software if you are expecting it to make an exact copy of a folder on your system to the external drive. The sync software will NOT copy any hidden files OR hidden folders to the external drive. I called their support and as you can predict, got basically nowhere. What the heck is wrong with companies and supporting their customers these days. They tried to tell me this is the way sync is supposed to work and that is the way the XP operating system works. Well, it doesn’t. If you drag and drop a folder with hidden files from your computer to the external drive, any hidden files in that folder are copied. The Seagate FreeAgent sync software does not copy those hidden files or folders. Windows Media Player, for example, creates album art files as hidden files in your music folder. Thus, if you sync your music folder to the Seagate drive with their sync software, your album art is NOT copied to the drive. Support then tried to tell me that even if they could fix the software, it would take over a year to get a release out. I thought “Huh?” and lifted by jaw off the floor. I write software for a living. This is a reasonable request if not an all out bug in their software. I would never say what they said to me to my customers. I would get them a fix asap. I pushed a little harder and had no luck in getting support to consider this a bug. Told him the box says “With software that lets you take your desktop environment and all of your files to go.” I asked what “ALL” meant and found out it does not mean hidden which to me says that is false advertising. After that he basically hung up on me.

I will probably keep one of the drives because the hardware seems ok. Has a 5 year warranty which is nice. I’ll just delete the software and go continue using ROBOCOPY like I do with my other drives.

Summary – Drive seems good. Do NOT use the sync software if you are expecting exact copies. Do NOT expect Seagate to fix the software either. I thought they were a better company than that.

BestBuy Geek Squad Data Recovery Services Review

This is pretty simple. If you are considering taking a bad drive to BestBuy and letting their Geek Squad people send it off for data recovery – DON’T DO IT ! They are horrible.

Day 1 – Dropped off my drive at the store and they said they needed to send it to Geek City for recovery services. Charged me a $70 non-refundable diagnostic fee. I was told a technician would call me in 2-3 days with a status.

Day 3, 4, and 5 – I tried to call Geek City to get a status. They have a number you can call and it says “Leave a message and we will call you back.” I left three messages on three days and nobody ever called me back. If I didn’t return customer messages, I would be out of business.

Day 6 – Back to the store to complain. I didn’t expect the drive to be fixed, just wanted a status on whether it could be fixed and how much.

Day 7 – Store escalated the request and a technician called me from Geek City. Said the drive would not spin up. I knew that was not true. I work with a lot with drives and had checked that drive before I let them have it. It was spinning, BIOS saw it, but Windows could not. I told the technician the drive did spin up and he goes “Let me try something” and comes back and says, “Wow, you’re right, it does spin up.” I wanted to say “Wow, you sure are not helping my confidence that you know what you are doing.” So he takes it back to put the drive in the data recovery machine for analysis. Calls me back in a few hours and says the drive is dead and will have to go in the clean room. It would cost me nearly $2000 and take 3-4 weeks to “possibly” recover my data. I told the tech to forget it and please send my drive back as soon as possible. He told me it would be sent two day shipping to the store.

Day 9 – I went to the store to pick up my drive and of course, no drive. I asked when it had been shipped and they said “today”. They could not provide a reason why it took two days to get thru their shipping. Plus, it was shipping ground and not 2 day. Wonderful. I asked for and was given the UPS tracking number and went home.

Day 13 – UPS tracking said drive was at store, so I went to pick it up. Go up to the desk and told they could not find the drive. They asked if I could leave and they would call me when they found it. I showed them the UPS tracking print out and said “the drive is here, I’m here, please get my drive now.” As if things could not get worse, another Geek Squad agent goes to the back and comes back with my drive. The idiots had shipped my drive in a box with NO padding and NO antistatic bag. Seriously, they literally threw my bare drive in a box and shipped it UPS. I thought I would faint thinking about UPS tossing this box around during shipment. Needless to say a manager got involved. He credited me my $70 diagnostic fee and that was about all I could get. He said the drive was bad, so how could they possible damage it with improper shipping. After I explained I was going to send it to another data recovery company, he said if  they could not repair it, he would give me a replacement drive. I guess that is about the best he could do.

Summary – Please do not ever take a bad drive to these people for repairs. They take forever, make it nearly impossible to find out a status on the repairs, charge a fortune, and mishandle your data to the point of negligence.

SSL – Use Absolute URLs for Navigation

From: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.HowToProtectFormsAuthentication

Navigating between the public and restricted areas of your site (that is, between HTTP and HTTPS pages) is an issue because a redirect always uses the protocol (HTTPS or HTTP) of the current page, not the target page.

Once a user logs on and browses pages in a directory that is secured with SSL, relative links such as “..\publicpage.aspx” or redirects to HTTP pages result in the pages being served using the https protocol, which incurs an unnecessary performance overhead. To avoid this, use absolute links such as “http://servername/appname/publicpage.aspx” when redirecting from an HTTPS page to an HTTP page.

Similarly, when you redirect to a secure page (for example, the login page) from a public area of your site, you must use an absolute HTTPS path, such as “https://servername/appname/secure/login.aspx”, rather than a relative path, such as restricted/login.aspx. For example, if your Web page provides a logon button (as opposed to the Login control), use the following code to redirect to the secure login page.

 private void btnLogon_Click( object sender, System.EventArgs e )  {   // Form an absolute path using the server name and v-dir name   string serverName =           HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"]);   string vdirName = Request.ApplicationPath;   Response.Redirect("https://" + serverName + vdirName +                      "/Restricted/Login.aspx");  }

ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool

Tool works ok on local development box. But when publish web site to another system, how do you get to this tool?

Do the following:

1. Create a virtual directory ASP.NETWebAdminFiles in ISS that points to: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework/v2.0.50727/ASP.NETWebAdminFiles

2. Open properties on new folder and make sure it is set to run with ASP.NET on the ASP.NET tab.

3. Might need to open Security tab and uncheck Anonymous Access and check Windows Authentication also.

4. To connect, remote desktop into server and start a browser with the address as follows:

http://localhost/ASP.NETWebAdminFiles/default.aspx?applicationPhysicalPath=C:inetpubwwwrootfooapp&applicationURL=/fooapp

5. Not recommended, but to access remotely, open WebAdminPage.cs and comment out the following code:
if (!application.Context.Request.IsLocal) {
SecurityException securityException = new SecurityException((string)HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject(“GlobalResources”, “WebAdmin_ConfigurationIsLocalOnly”));
WebAdminPage.SetCurrentException(application.Context, securityException);
application.Server.Transfer(“~/error.aspx”);
}

CSS Repeat Image Left and Right Margins

I needed to do a web page with an image that repeats down the left and right side of the browser window. The images need to fill the entire window, even if the window is resized. Also, the middle part needs to be dynamic. Here is an excellent example of how to do this:

http://www.builderau.com.au/program/css/soa/Create_a_double_gradation_background_with_CSS/0,339028392,339207226,00.htm#leaveyourcomment

This guy really wrote this up very well. Nice simple concise example of how to do this. Pretty much took as is.

Unrecognized configuration section ‘connectionStrings’

Created a new ASP.NET Web Application (WAP) in VS 2005. Runs ok with built-in web server. Start IE separately and try to run the app (http://localhost/appname) and get an error in the browser “Unrecognized configuration section ‘connectionStrings'”. Have to go into IIS config to fix. Start IIS Admin. To to appname Properties. Click the ASP.NET tab and change from ASP 1 to ASP 2. Error goes away in IE.

CString::Format Changed in VS 2005

I have a lot of C++ code. Recently converted from VS 2003 to 2005 and have to say it went smoother than I thought. One glitch did popup rcently though. I had this code that would do something like:

astr.Format (astrHeadingFormat, iHeading);

which worked fine in 2003. However, we have this feature that allows the user to uppercase headings. This made the heading string go from something like:

“%d – Some Heading” to “%D – Some Heading”

VS 2003 had no problem with the uppercase formatter, but 2005 decides to throw an exeption. In the release version of my software, this meant the app just goes away. Poof! Main window gone. Took some digging to finally figure it out. Guess I need to go through all the code that uses .Format and put try/catch around it. I wonder if MS documented this change somewhere to the .Format method because it used to work fine and not throw an exception (even though I know uppercase D is not valid now).

Classic ASP Debugging with Visual Stupido 2005

In their wisdom, classic asp debugging was removed from Visual Studio 2005. Well sort of. Just not as easy to get to. Anyway, here are the tricks to debugging classic asp  in 2005.
1. Start your web site in a browser (not through VS).
2. Go into VS and attach to the dllhost process. The one that is running scripts.
3. Set your breakspoints and go back to the browser and do whatever to make them hit the bp.
4. Also make sure debugging is turned on in IIS for the app.
I do this on XP Pro with IIS 6 and it seems to work. I have not tried it with the built in web server in vs 2005. That thing seemed goofy.

BellSouth DSL Xtreme 6.0

Is BellSouth DSL Xtreme 6.0 ever going to get to my house? I heard on the radio this morning the RoadRunner is up to 8Mbs now. I am stuck at 3 with my DSL. BellSouth DSL has been good. Very rarely goes down and I get pretty much the 3Mbps they advertise, but faster is always better. What annoys me is trying to call them on the phone to find out when 6.0 will be available at my house. I have called for months and nobody can ever tell you. Assuming you can understand what they are saying over the phone. How can it possibly help them to not be able to tell me when 6.0 will be at my house? I think I may have to switch to RR if something does not change soon. Maybe I’ll call BellSouth and tell them I am going to cancel, maybe that will get their attention.