The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Hopeless helplines and NASty problems
I
n today’s endlessly ‘online’,
never face-to-face world, too many
helplines simply don’t help, using
faceless staff who work from a script,
filibustering with instructions to try
irrelevant fixes.
Sky’s the limit
The last time I looked, Sky’s NowTV
had still not solved the problem of
some programmes stopping half-way
through or failing to start after the
adverts which paying subscribers
are forced to watch – an annoyance
which brings unhappy memories
of retail DVDs which could not be
fast-forwarded through the jungle
of trailers, adverts and promotions
embedded ahead of the programme.
For many months, the adverts on
Sky Now have been in audio-only.
The screen only springs into life as
the adverts end and the programme
begins. I have greatly enjoyed not
wasting my time on reporting this
user-benefit fault. I’ll bet many others
have happily not reported it either.
Sky’s technical support either does
not monitor its own NowTV service
or is unable to fix faults. All in all,
it’s a win-win for paying customers.
Artificial unintelligence
If only things worked like that with
other services where the customer
suffers from terrible help support. In
my experience, NatWest bank’s Artificial Intelligence chatbot Cora is so
Unintelligent that it fails to understand
even the simplest customer question.
I previously reported here on a
gung-ho speech made by Dan Fahy
of Paramount at the annual Digital
TV Group conference, ahead of the
Paramount + streaming service launch.
Essentially, Fahy was promising Nirvana, and in good faith I quoted him.
But when I later tried the service for
myself it took a time-wasting trudge
of 14 emails before the Paramount
Help Line admitted what it should
have been able to advise immediately;
although Roku streaming devices work
with Paramount, the device which
Roku makes for Sky is designed not
to work with Paramount.
I’ve contacted Dan Fahy and Paramount (several times) to report what
it’s like for real world customers to
use Fahy’s help line. But no reply.
With subscription service help lines
the customer usually has the last word
and final sanction – cancel the sub. The
clear moral of any and all subscription
service stories is don’t subscribe to
any service for a year. Instead, start off
opting for a week or month, until you
know it works for you. Ideally take up
an offer of a free period and really test
it before paying a penny.
1555F IP68 sealed flanged enclosures
Brainless bots
The extent to which Help and Feedback services are now under unthinking bot control is nicely evidenced
by the Microsoft system used to autovet comments on this news site:
https://bit.ly/pe-ape23-msn
I innocently tried to add a polite
comment suggesting that Paramount
should look at the quality of its Customer Support, and briefly noted my
experience of 14 emails needed to
answer a simple question. But all
useful versions of the comment were
repeatedly rejected with the error
message ‘Does not meet The Microsoft
Start Community Guidelines.’
Inquisitive readers may like to experiment with their own test messages
designed to discover whether it is
length, content or key word that makes
the Microsoft computer say, ‘No’.
NASty
With expensive hardware, it may not
be easy, or even possible, to get out of
a deal. I’ll recount one story because
the fix I found for myself, with next
to no useful help from the company,
has much broader value.
IT company Terramaster specialises
in NAS (Network Attached Storage)
devices. I bought myself the solidly
built, and attractively priced, twobay F2-210, built round an ARM
w !
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n ze s
si
Learn more: hammfg.com/1555f
Contact us to request a free evaluation sample.
uksales<at>hammfg.com • 01256 812812
10
Practical Electronics | April | 2023
There’s no such thing as a free NAS.
processor. I quickly found why it
had been attractively priced; it was
saddled with an out-dated Operating
System (TOS Ver.4) that relied on
obsolete Adobe Flash.
Terramaster said it was developing
an updated, Flash-free Operating
System, TOS 5. But it would work
only with Terramaster’s newer models
such as the F2-221, which uses an
Intel processor. The company, which
is based in Shenzhen, Guangdong,
China, and has no visible local Western contact points, offered to send me
an F2-221 in return for my taking part
in a Beta test on pre-release TOS 5. It
sounded like a good trade, but I was
soon reminded that there really is no
such thing as a free lunch (or NAS).
The NAS arrived, without any
HDDs, so I had to go out and buy
myself two 4TB drives. Various
download versions of the TOS 5
Beta followed, thick and fast, and
it quickly became apparent that the
way Terramaster (and probably other
Chinese companies) run Beta trials
is very different from the way other
IT companies run them. Beta testers
are guinea pigs who devote man days
to installing new versions, hitting
multiple problems, describing them
to the Chinese developer ‘Help Line’,
getting back multiple and often offpoint suggestions on what to try, and
then describing what did and didn’t
work, until a new version is offered
and the whole time-consuming cycle
starts again.
Obviously, what’s needed, but is
missing, is a shared database showing
what issues other testers have already
found. Without information sharing,
everyone wastes a shedload of time
on describing duplicate discoveries.
Eventually, TOS 5 limped from
Beta to a series of official releases,
Practical Electronics | April | 2023
with buggy versions
quickly superseded
by newer versions
with fresh problems.
The language barrier
between English and
Chinese repeatedly
blocked useful help
and support. I regularly took myself
back to brownfield,
by re-initialising the
NAS with the recommended procedure
– remove HDDs, run
the maker’s initialisation App (TNAS-PC)
on a PC and replace
the NAS HDDs to trigger automatic
download of a bootloader App.
Obstacles abounded and with no
real help from Terramaster’s Help,
I discovered by tedious trial and error a trick which may well be more
widely useful. Here it is.
The trick
Thanks to an industry-wide move
from http to https IP addressing,
browsers now often refuse to load
pages and throw the error message
‘Not Secure’. This bedevilled the NAS
set-up process. If you suffer from a
similar affliction, with any procedure,
try clicking on the Error display to
‘Turn on Warnings’. Then try again to
load the page. After several tries (how
many tries seems unpredictable) the
browser may throw a different error
which again warns that the IP is Not
Secure but now gives the option to
‘Continue to Site’.
Yippee. Unfortunately, this was
only the start of the obstacle course.
The HDDs for any NAS will need
initialisation, which involves downloading the latest version of the NAS
operating system (in this case TOS 5),
formatting the HDDs, synchronising
them for RAID working and creating a
secure username and password with
online registration.
But mysteriously, the result may be
a NAS which appears to have been
successfully initialised but is in fact
unable to store data, even its own
name and password. Repeating the
initialisation, any number of times,
leads to the same failure.
Terramaster Help was so totally
stumped that they ended up sending me replacement hardware to try
with my 4TB HDDs. The result was
still the same; failure to retain data
even after complete re-initialisation.
Finally – and with no meaningful
help from Terramaster Help – the
penny dropped. Although the NAS
was checking the HDDs every time
it initialised them, and then going
ahead and wiping them clean, the
initialisation software was sniffing the
relics of the previously created NAS
proprietary file system and performing
only minimal HDD checks. This is
comparable to the difference between
a PC performing a quick, simple disc
format, and slow, full formatting. The
simple disc check misses any embedded HDD corruption (perhaps caused
by bad shutdown or power glitches)
and thus skips some set-up steps. So,
any corruption buried deep inside the
disc structure remains intact.
The simple (when you twig it) solution is to force the HDDs back to their
‘factory fresh’ state, with only unallocated space. This has to be done by
physically removing the drives from
the NAS, hooking them direct to a
PC, by SATA lead or USB/HDD connector, and using a software tool such
as Windows Disc Management App.
This tool is well hidden behind: My
Computer>Manage> Disc Management!
When the HDDS have been totally
wiped clean, with only unallocated
space, any disc initialisation process starts from greenfield and fully
re-formats the discs according to its
own preferred file system.
Main takeaways
The lesson to be learned here extends
far beyond a troublesome Terramaster
NAS. If any HDD is giving inexplicable
and persistent problems, even after
supposedly complete re-initialisation,
try returning it to factory-fresh state
with only unallocated space.
I tried sharing this fix with Terramaster and got back the ‘strong’
advice to replace the HDDs – which
seems a very costly alternative to
wiping them clean!
I suspect the language barrier is
at work here. Who am I to criticise
Chinese IT Help engineers for having
difficulty with my English? I don’t
speak a word of Chinese. But, I don’t
try and sell IT into China.
Apart from the specific tech tip to
try returning troublesome HDDs to
factory fresh, unallocated state, the
much broader lesson to be learned
is that there are very real pitfalls in
buying non-trivial IT direct from a
Chinese company, with no UK subsidiary or agency to contact, and thus
having to rely on Help from China.
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