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I love my Drobo. I know it’s the yuppie version of a home raid array, but it’s quiet enough to keep in my living room and it looks like something out of Tron.

Mine is a 2nd generation 4 bay Drobo that I’ve been using for a couple years. It’s worked well enough that my partner and I managed to fill it up! No problem, I thought, I’ll just swing by Fry’s Electronics and pick up a new shiny 3TB disk, right? Wrong.

I pulled out a lowly 1TB disk, popped in the new 3TB one and saw a red blinky light :( According to the docs, this indicates that my disk was dead on arrival. I refused to believe this. I thought, “This is a big drive, maybe I need to update the firmware?” It turned out to be a bit more complicated than this.

If your Drobo is blinking red on your brand new drive, follow these steps to fix it:

1. Look at your Drobo Dashboard software. Does it look like something written in FoxPro or Tron? If it looks like Tron skip ahead to step 5.
2. Upgrading Drobo Dashboard: Since you have the older, grayer Drobo Dashboard, there’s something you should know: it’s lying to you. It probably says your Drobo’s firmware is up to date. It’s wrong. To upgrade the firmware you must first upgrade the dashboard.
3. Navigate to Drobo’s downloads page. Download the appropriate software. In my case this was the software under ‘Drobo Gen 2’ way down near the bottom of the page.
4. Install the new dashboard. The specific instructions will depend on your platform. It should be easy so I won’t go through the specifics here. After the installation you may need to reboot.
5. Upgrading your Drobo’s Firmware: Since you’re now using the new shiny Drobo Dashboard reminiscent of Tron, you can upgrade the firmware :D Simply fire up the Drobo Dashboard click on All Devices -> Status and follow the dialogs to upgrade to the latest firmware.

After your Drobo reboots it will accept your new hard disk. In as little as a day the blinking LEDs will go solid green and you will be able to enjoy your increased storage capacity. Grats!

Almost a year ago I purchased a wildcard SSL certificate from GoDaddy. When it was first issued I simply loaded it into into my Zeus ZXTM load balancer with the import button.

Everything seemed fine for quite awhile. I visited my web site in Firefox and in all of the flavors of IE. It seemed to work great. That is, until, someone called me to let me know that Safari was not accepting the certificate! I thought I was in trouble until I googled around and found many blog entries about the root cause. It turns out that my server, or in this case my Zeus ZXTM load balancer, was not configured to display the whole certificate chain back to the root authority.

This makes me wonder how this worked at all in every other web browser. Perhaps this is such a common problem that the other browsers hack around it?

Anyway, the fix was easy enough but the terminology was different. Rather than an SSLCertificateChainFile, my ZXTM called it an ‘Intermediate Certificate’. One click of a button, browsing to gd_bundle.crt (provided with my original certificate), and it was loaded up and the issue was fixed.