Tag: Tech Support

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QNAP Customer Support Failure (Unsupported Project)!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and this month’s check in is… well… Let’s just get started.

Support Letdown

Last month, I was about a week into a QNAP support ticket to configure LDAP to an LLDAP server. Long story short: They took another three weeks to drop me. Practically a whole month wasted getting nothing out of them at all. Nothing.

The guy I talked to was polite though.

Backing up to the beginning for a recap: QNAP’s support set an expectation early that I would hear back once a day around 5:00 PM. I flubbed working with their interface, made two tickets, and they were merged without a note, leaving my support agent confused, and we were unproductive for a full day. By gathering everything I knew, I got my device logging in, but QTS (QNAP’s operating system for Network Attached Storages, or NAS’s) never populated the Domain Users list.

Using a combination of Wireshark, LLDAP’s logs, and analysis by Shimmering Dust, my Hermes AI agent, I was left with the conclusion that QTS wanted more of the LDAP standard implemented than LLDAP supports by default. My support question ended up in the back room, where I hung in limbo for a week.

Shortly after I asked if the ticket was still alive, the back room got back to my original assigned agent saying something along the lines of “LLDAP does not support SAMBA.” I don’t want SAMBA. That is Windows’ Active Directory stuff. I run in the Linux ecosystem. I saw a reference to ChatGPT in a link the back room tried to direct me to about SAMBA, and I started to wonder if it was human miscommunication or if I was subject to a third-hand AI hallucination. Turns out some of them use it as a translator from Mandarin to English (the support center is in Taiwan).

In either case, I was in-fact dealing with a human, and we had a human interaction waiting for the back room, who proceeded to advise that QTS did not support direct LDAP despite having LDAP as an option in their interface! It took a couple more rejections before I was convinced they finally weren’t under the illusion that I was about to subject my homelab to a Microsoft license agreement.

And there I was dropped. There was a little corporate ceremony about making a feature request to support LLDAP and thanking me for my cooperation and debug information, but at the end of the day, I felt like I was handled like a good-hearted, but tech-illiterate granny; my demonstrated skill level appears to have had no room for recognition in their program. I literally could have had a faster and equally productive experience explaining my problem to a rubber duck. I wasn’t even graced with a hint at which of the LDAP data fields were mission-critical for QTS to recognize a server.

I feel burned… but at least my agent was polite.

Studying for CCNA

On a totally unrelated note, I have enrolled in Network Chuck’s “Fall into CCNA” class. I’ve been meaning to get a certification or few (or at least the complete knowledge set to back them up), and decided to sign up. It takes a lot of my available focus, leaving less time for blog projects. The day this goes live is the beginning of week 3. One look through the study plan, and I either know or at least recognize most of the concepts mentioned.

The class is structured around this post-apocalyptic scenario where an entrepreneur in a nuclear wasteland has rediscovered coffee beans and engineered his potions to give people radiation resistance. His small shop is expanding to multiple locations with district offices and a headquarters. And they have hired *you* to design a production-level network comparable to real-world business – right down to the legal notice that unauthorized access equipment will “end badly.” It’s hokey, but it gives the mind a story to latch on to while absorbing otherwise dry examples.

I made a virtual machine (VM) to use for the class. Lesson 0 was about obtaining and installing Packet Tracer, a program from Cisco included with their free courses. Pick one, sign up, then ditch. Then I heard about the labs. See, Packet Tracer is a “simulator.” It’s great for anyone of any skill level to explore how a pile of network gear might work in the real world when you hook it up, but it isn’t 1:1. It has bugs, it is focused exclusively on Cisco, and the early 00’s are calling about getting their interface back. The hidden dark mode is 20% more bearable.

But in practice, the VM has mostly been used for watching class live streams. Turns out the class includes these labs in the course work where we have access to the actual Cisco IOS licensed by the class (Turns out Apple stole the name iOS and they settled with Cisco out of court). Feedback from the summer session has been glowing from the labs, so they’re clearly important.

I’ve spent the last few years poking around with networking goodies off and on, so until we hit the labs, I knew most of the theory we were going over. But yesterday (as of posting), I slammed into a lab quite hard. ~3.5 hours minimum, not counting the time already sunk on Friday. 45 minutes (resettable) on the clock. Pain. Also not helping was how a few concepts were used that hadn’t been formally introduced yet – or the legacy shortcut keys I haven’t been formally introduced to.

Takeaway

Trials and failure are a part of learning. Right now, I’m feeling defeated, but on some level, I understand that that only becomes true when I put it down forever, which I have no intention of doing at present.

Prayer

Father in Heaven,

This hasn’t been a fun month for projects. I haven’t completed anything novel to report on, so I am presenting what I do have. And at that, I choose to keep one work-in-progress I’m stuck on to myself.

I ask for your guidance and encouragement in these projects, just as I ask you bless the hands of my readers where they might be lost and without a guide. I ask that you be with my classmates – may the various, alien-feeling concepts and commands work towards as a second language to us, because I don’t know how many more labs I can take like this last one!

In Jesus’ name I pray,
Amen

Final Question

I’ll open it up. Do you use LLDAP as an authentication server? For QNAP? How did you get it to work?

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Dropped Computer Warranty Work

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I have an update on my father’s (Leo_8472) new computer. Let’s get started!

It’s Going Back

I have throughly tested my father’s new Thelio Mira from System76: it needs to go back. There is no doubt: the shipping company dropped it, and it sustained damage. While Sonic Frontiers seemingly eventually stabilized after re-seating the graphics card (GPU), the RTX remasters of Portal and its unofficial mod, Portal Prelude, crash the system in around half an hour.

The human System76 agent we’ve been working with (I’ll call him Luke for this post) mentioned advanced replacement where we retain the original computer while waiting for the new one. Once we sign to receive delivery, we have two weeks to return the old or it goes on a provided credit card. This arrangement gave us time to swap the hard drive –an M.2 chip– as we’d spent some good time setting everything up. And since it’s a Linux machine as opposed to Windows, the operating system won’t give us any licensing flack over a different motherboard!

M.2 Exchange

The replacement system arrived with its packaging scratched, but not crushed. M.2 drives typically mount directly to the motherboard, and Leo’s system is no exception. Luckily, the its innards are arranged for access without removing the CPU heatsink and having to redo the thermal paste – though we do have to remove the GPU to get to them. There, we find four M.2 slots in a 1+3 arrangement with the 1 slot having a a fancier heatsink supposedly intended to host a primary OS drive.

The Thelio Mira has some convenience ports on the top. When the first system was dropped, these got tweaked – giving us a bad first impression; the warranty replacement lined up, leaving me with a sense of satisfaction every time we closed up the case. Where the original had a lone, damaged bracket to stabilize the GPU during shipment, the new system arrived with two square brackets secured a little tighter than before. As we had explained our plan to swap the drives to Luke, I expected no M.2 chip. Sure enough, the single chip bank was empty. Curiosity struck however, and we found one of equivalent size when we removed the larger bank’s heatsink. We swapped the chips and re-assembled the new computer.

Testing and Return

When booted, the new system gave nothing until we bypassed the video card. We unplugged everything for the I-forget-how-many-th time, opened it back up, and reseated the card. In the process, a push wing broke off the PCI slot’s retainer clip – leaving us with no easy removal of the GPU once it clicked into place. During long-term testing involving a [mostly?] blind game of Portal Prelude, we noticed that the system was significantly quieter while under load.

We kept Luke informed about the development, and he appeared confused at our request to buy the good clip off the dropped-computer motherboard. To our simultaneous request to purchase and retain the additional M.2 chip, he referred us to an online store instead of offering a price to buy the one in hand. We went ahead and extracted the good clip. Leo used a wooden chopstick to interface with the damaged clip when extracting the good GPU. As “beautiful” as the unused M.2 drive was, we installed it in the dropped computer when reassembling the machines, printed off a shipping label, and packaged the dropped computer in its original, dropped box. As a good customer, I planned to include the unused power cord, but we couldn’t find it. I extracted the original System76 cord from use at Leo’s workstation and replaced it from our sock. It should be in the mail by this afternoon.

Takeaway

System76 takes customer support seriously. Luke (not his provided first or last name) worked to turn our poor initial impressions around where a support chatbot would have worked toward cementing us against future computers from them. I in turn could play an active role in diagnostics – presumably skipping some early portions of his script. Perhaps catering towards Linux attracts more tech savvy customers, meaning fewer cases where a bot would be helpful.

Regarding the computer case: it’s a little more tedious to open than I like when working on computers, but we got faster each time. The custom cut rocket graphics are fun, but the most I saw of them were the PCI expansion bay covers I usually found tricky to re-install. I don’t like dealing with the case, but it was miles better than shipping it back and forth and having to wipe its data.

Final Question

Leo and I have been maintaining separate accounts, and I believe this has given me a better intuition about normal users vs. using sudo. Have you ever meaningfully shared a Linux machine?

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