JON HONEYBALL
Jon warms to the Samsung Galaxy S8 DeX docking station, gets narky with Norton, and explains why Microsoft still lags behind Apple for hardware
Jon warms to the Samsung Galaxy S8 DeX docking station, gets narky with Norton, and explains why Microsoft still lags behind Apple for hardware.
Now this is a curious thing. Curious indeed, said Alice. I’m typing these words into Word, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I’m typing it into Word running on Android; again, not the world’s biggest shock. Except I’m using a mobile phone, a proper keyboard and mouse, and a full-sized screen. And the Android unit is a phone sat in a cradle.
The phone screen itself is blank, but I have a full monitor to work with. It has a desktop that looks remarkably like Windows 10 (but isn’t, obviously). The icons are sensible; I can find all the things I need to work with. System-level stuff is just like Android on the phone itself. It’s a pretty seamless experience and it does all that I need it to do most of the time, which is a pretty scary combination.
The hardware? It’s a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone mounted in the company’s DeX docking station. The DeX unit has USB-C for power in, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port for video, and a couple of USB ports for keyboard and mouse (although you can use Bluetooth, if you wish). Just sit the S8 down into the DeX cradle, and the screen lights up with the desktop.
Sound too good to be true? Well, yes and no. Having everything that’s on your phone available on a desktop is excellent. Your data is there; it’s a one-stop shop for all your stuff. The range of apps available that support the full desktop experience isn’t large, but it does cover most of what you’ll need, including Office, email, web and so forth. Apps that aren’t DeX-blessed will still work, but they’ll run in a phone-sized and phone-shaped window on the desktop.
Why is my interest piqued by the S8 when Microsoft has its Continuum solution for Windows Mobile? Well, there are many more S8s out there than Microsoft and its partners can ship of Windows Mobile devices, unfortunately.
You’re probably wondering about the catch. The browser isn’t Chrome, but something that Samsung has put together. Performance is pretty good, but I noticed slight lag while typing away at high speed into Word. And there’s a somewhat weird switcheroo that happens when you move from standard phone mode to DeX mode – it’s almost as if the phone boots itself into this other world. Apps that you had open in standard mode will need to be opened again, which is somewhat of a disconnect.
Worse still, it’s an add-on from Samsung, not part of the base OS. If it was part of the base OS, then I’d feel considerably more secure with regards to its long-term prospects. Do I trust that Samsung will support this for a given amount of time? No, because it makes no such claim. I’d be far more impressed if the company publicly stated that this technology will be in the S9, S10 and so forth, and will be available and supported for a minimum of five years.
And finally, it would work well if everything connected over USB-C and we had monitor solutions that just plugged in and worked. Paying over a hundred quid for the DeX base seems somewhat rapacious when you’ve already paid a small fortune for the otherwise gorgeous S8 phone. Why is there no integrated solution built into a monitor for a credible price of less than £250, offering connectivity, keyboard mouse and screen for a packaged price?
As it stands, it’s a great solution for a weekend cottage getaway. Just carry your phone there and plug in. Ideal if you’re on a motorbike and don’t have much carry space. However, despite the importance of Samsung in the mobile market, it’s still too early for this sort of solution – which is a shame. Clearly, the hardware can take the performance load, but there are way too many loose strings to make this viable. Now, if Apple added in such capability to the next iPhone, then we could have a tipping point.
Norton kills Dropbox
Norton Small Business appeared perfect for my company, but the bullet points didn’t mention that it would kill the Dropbox loader application. Sometimes, you can go off a product very quickly.
I decided I needed to roll out an antivirus package on the desktops in the lab, despite them being on a wholly physically separate network from any test computers. As you might imagine, we have no idea what might be on a computer or other device that comes through the door. Occasionally – and fortunately it is rare – something nasty does indeed squeeze through, and despite the hermetically sealed procedures, something can go wrong.
I decided on Norton as it offers reasonable Windows and Mac clients. A small-business licence for 20 computers was quite cheap at around £100 a year. It seemed ideal, right up to the point at which I installed the Mac client on my main Mac Pro workstation. It scanned the storage, both local and USB/Thunderboltattached Drobo, and found nothing untoward. Well, that was excluding the small but somewhat important fact that it decided to delete the Dropbox loader application. Intrigued, I downloaded the Dropbox installer, re-ran the installation, and watched while Norton decided to consume a key component of Dropbox right in front of my eyes.
Surprised, I tried it on a second Mac, a MacBook Pro. The same thing happened. At this point, I knew that something was up. A quick scan of the Norton forums showed that others had noticed this somewhat sub-optimal behaviour too. And Norton had promised that it had been fixed, several times. It was time to launch Thunderbirds.
I began a live chat with a support engineer at Norton. After some comments that hopefully showed that I knew what I was talking about, the engineer asked if he could remote access my workstation. Why not? The box had no confidential information on it, and its Dropbox support is for a specific and minor slice of the main store, because this is a test workstation for evaluating antivirus products.
After a lot of faffing, the engineer remote-connected my Mac Pro workstation and had a poke around. Although that’s being somewhat generous. A slightly less generous view may be that the support engineer didn’t know the Mac client at all, and was poking at almost anything on-screen to see if it mattered. One bit he didn’t spot was the Parallel Tools toolbox, which includes a rather good full-screen, real-time screenrecording application – I wasn’t going to allow an engineer to connect without me keeping a full record of what was happening.
After some 30 minutes of poking and fiddling, the engineer decided that maybe Norton really was killing off Dropbox, and the information I’d given an hour previously had been correct. I was promised it would be pushed upstream to the developers.
Some of what was said in the session is priceless. For example, it’s apparently perfectly normal for apps to be unexpectedly deleted – and that this wasn’t a worry.
A few days later, I received an email from Norton support telling me that the matter had been fixed, and that I could download a Rapid Release update from an FTP address. Well, I went, I looked, and found a mess of confusing files that didn’t tell me anything. Fortunately, an update to the definitions of Norton stopped it killing off my Dropbox loader, and everything has since been alright.
But am I happy? No, not really. If AV products are going to mess with systems that are working perfectly well, then it should be easier for such issues to be fixed without so much time and effort. And what does it say about Norton’s internal testing protocols that something so obvious and ubiquitous as Dropbox can get hammered and no-one notice?
Dropbox mass undelete
I like Dropbox a lot. Its business platform provides an invaluable part of the information flow of my business, and I rely on its capabilities on a daily basis. I’d be happier if I could install private encryption keys into the client in a seamless fashion, but maybe that will come. One feature I really love is that I have an unlimited undo of the 10TB of data I hold in the Dropbox cloud. And last week I decided to move a whole bunch of older stuff from one part of the Dropbox tree to another. This involved a large delete operation, so imagine my surprise and delight to receive an email from Dropbox telling me that a large delete had happened, and did I really mean it? And if not, here’s the link that will undo the delete process and put everything back to how it was.
This is the sort of functionality I expect from a mature product, and it simply reaffirms my choice. It works seamlessly on all the platforms I use, including our large NAS installations. I could use OneDrive, for example, but it would deliver me only a partial answer. And I doubt it would contact me to tell me that lots of files had been deleted.
Microsoft Surface
As you can see from this month’s reviews section ( see p50), Microsoft is releasing yet more Surface products, having woken up to the idea that the best solution for the customer is when the OS and the hardware comes from one vendor. Anyone who’s been using Apple for the last decade will know this, of course, but in the Windows world this wasn’t possible until Microsoft had a major hissy fit with the third-party vendors and finally
“The engineer didn’t know the Mac client at all, and was poking at anything on-screen to see if it mattered”
decided to build its own hardware. I feel for the third-party developers. With little to differentiate their products from a competitor, and with the large cost of a Windows licence hanging over their heads, they had to resort to unpleasantness such as loading on third-party tools – bloatware, to give it its politer name – to make some money.
However, Microsoft’s own-brand hardware has always intrigued me, because the Surface products haven’t pushed the boundaries as far as they might. A few months ago, I reported how one of my Dell XPS 13 laptops had imploded in a quite spectacular fashion – at boot-up time, it reported there was some unsigned app loading as part of the boot process and that this couldn’t be tolerated. There was no real recovery process, other than to shove a Microsoft original Windows 10 master-install USB stick into an available orifice and force a full reinstall of the computer.
At the time, I thought it was a one-off, given the issues I’d seen with the XPS 13 at launch, with such horrors as unsigned UEFI updater apps from Dell itself.
So imagine my surprise to discover the exact fault occurring on my Microsoft Surface Book yesterday. I’d simply taken it home from the lab to do some twiddling on some firmware, and this felt better achieved from a real Windows box than from my usual VM on the MacBook Pro. When I fired up the Surface Book, it told me – in very small letters, as a result of the high-resolution screen – that the boot process had been compromised in exactly the same way.
So I had to get in the car, go back to the lab to collect a genuine Windows 10 USB install stick. Once I’d shoved this into the Book, and restarted it, I could move forward to a full, clean reinstallation followed by updating to the latest version – a process that took several hours.
If I had the same problem on my MacBook Pro sat alongside it, I’d have held down Splodge R during boot, and then forced the laptop to boot directly from the internet servers held at Apple. The OS would have downloaded itself, installed and then updated. Given that both Apple and Microsoft are working with almost exactly the same base hardware design, I have to wonder why it is that Apple can enable its UEFI to allow for remote boot and install, and Microsoft can’t.
To be blunt, Microsoft has to do more with its own-brand hardware to allow this sort of functionality to work. I’m sure that OEMs will squeal, but then they can be offered something equivalent. I don’t see why Dell can’t offer a remote boot option too, although given its past behaviour with UEFI code and updates, I’m still not sure it’s trustworthy for the task.
To get around this issue, I’ve been looking at base-level backup tools for Windows that allow me to take an image from a working installation, and then to rewrite the whole machine. In the past, the clear leader in this space was Norton Ghost, although Wikipedia tells me that this was discontinued in 2013 – it has certainly disappeared from the Norton website.
A good friend, Robert, recommended that I look at Veeam, which is a high-end backup/recovery tool for Windows that specialises in virtual machines. I confess it had been off my radar for a while because it had no Mac OS X client that I could find. But my interest was piqued when
Robert explained that not only did Veeam have a free version for Windows workstations, but that it could do the full bare-metal backup and restore too. There are three versions of Veeam for Windows: the free one, then pay-for Workstation and Server versions too. These can connect through to an enterprisewide Veeam installation that can also include cloud archiving.
But the free one looked just right for my needs. I can store either to a locally connected hard disk via USB, or send it off to a network-connected NAS, for which a small Synology or equivalent NAS is obviously ideal. Running the first backup takes a full image, which was some 23GB in the case of my just-reinstalled Surface Book, and then a follow-up backup 30 minutes later required only an incremental size of some 300MB.
Getting things back onto a device obviously requires a recovery boot USB stick or equivalent. The tool offers to make this for you, and you’ll need to keep this with you to connect through to the remote store and thus start hauling the main image back onto the target computer. Nevertheless, this is going to be far less expensive than a full Microsoft Windows 10 installation USB stick, and it will be faster in practice because you’ll be bringing back the image, and thus have both the base OS, all the updates, and the apps as well.
So I’m looking to use Veeam for such hardware restores. To have had a fault appear once is understandable. To have it appear twice in a few months on different hardware, makes me suspicious.
Oh, and some of you will remember a really amazing boot manager/installation tool that I described a few years ago. It allowed you to PXE boot from a server and then choose which OS and app images you wanted to install. I hadn’t had time to visit it since then, but a few weeks ago, I heard that it has rebranded to OneDeploy at
onedeploy.com. I really should visit the developers again to catch up on their latest work – they were very interesting back then, and I doubt they have sat on their laurels. More information when I get time to sit down with them.