Monthly Archives: October 2014

Xsan 4 in OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)

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Apple released Yosemite (OS X 10.10) today.  The big news for me is the built-in version of Xsan is v.4. But don’t get too excited and upgrade your OS without some planning (and backups). If your systems are in production then please leave them as is. Install OS X 10.10 on a test system first. Install a test Xsan and play with that. Don’t test in production. ‘Nough said.

What you need to know is, if you upgrade your Mac to 10.10 then it is officially incompatible with Xsan 3. You can NOT have Xsan 3 (10.9) clients on a 10.10 Xsan, and I don’t think that 10.10 (Xsan 4) clients will work on a Xsan 3 based SAN. There may be a hack to get incompatible versions working together but that’s left to imaginative tinkerers and not useful for production where deadlines are involved.

I’ve done some basic testing with Xsan 4 and it does away with the Xsan Admin app, all setup is done in the Server.app. Also, it depends on Open Directory (and DNS, of course). If there is no OD master set up then it will create one (same with DNS). If you have OD then join your Xsan controllers to it as replicas or else they will create a new OD master on the first Xsan controller and a replica on the second. You were warned.

To configure the clients you export a config profile and install it on the clients, or alternatively you can enrol the Xsan controller in MDM (Profile Manager, for example) and push out the config to the clients.

I have not tested Xsan 4 with StorNext but I expect there is compatibility, as usual.

In Summary:

More testing is needed, but strictly speaking Xsan 4 is not going to work with Xsan 3 and vice versa. If an Xsan 3 (10.9 client) is part of Xsan 4 (10.10) then it may work but commands and configs will not come across (unmount / mount the volume, the volume is destroyed stop looking for it, etc).

And now for some screenshots of the actual setup.

Step 1. Install Server. Turn on Xsan and get ready to rumble.

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 2.02.06 PM

Step 2. Change your name. If you’re using dot-local change it.

Change-dot-local-name-Xsan4

Step 3. Set up valid DNS

Setup-DNS-if-you-dont-have-none

Step 4. Set up a new SAN

Set-up-new-SAN

Step 5. Choose a SAN name

Choose-SAN-Name

Step 6. Configure Users and Groups (OD)

Config-users-groups

Step 7. Choose your organization name

OD-name

Step 8. Create the Xsan volume

Add-Xsan-volume2

Step 9. Add LUNs to your storage

Edit-storage-pool-add-LUNs

Step 10. Save a configuration profile

Save-mobile-config

Step 11. Deploy config to clients

Use MDM or manually deliver the file to your clients.

Stay tuned.

NFS set up with OS X 10.9 Mavericks

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One way to set up NFS shares on OS X 10.9.x

Summary: On OS X create “exports” text file describing your share that you want to export over NFS. Server.app is not necessary or needed. On the client the fstab file will describe the client end where the share gets mounted. Note: use whatever text editor you wish, whether it is vi, nano or TextWrangler, etc.

Server:

1. “sudo vi /etc/exports” example:

/MySharedFolder -maproot=nobody

2. “sudo nfsd checkexports”

Check the correctness of exports file

3. “sudo nfsd enable”

Start nfsd

Note: run “sudo kill -1 `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`” is nfsd had been running previously and you want to reread exports.

4. “/usr/bin/showmount -e”

Test the share. It should show something like: “/MySharedFolder Everyone”

Client:

1. “mkdir /MyShare”

Make the mount point for the NFS share

2. “vi /etc/fstab”

Edit the fstab file to show the mounts you wish to have

Example:

192.168.23.5:/MySharedFolder /MyShare nfs rw,async,noatime 0 0

4. “mount -a”

Mount all

Automatic Archive in Archiware P5

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Let’s say you work in the media and entertainment industry, perhaps in Post production, and maybe, just maybe, you shoot a lot of digital film (R3D, Arri RAW, XDCAM, etc), and just maybe you have a SAN. And maybe you’re lucky and you set up a nice backup system using Archiware P5, for example. What about archive? What about finished projects, what do you do about that? Even more importantly, what do you do about the camera archives? That’s the digital film footage that comes in and gets copied to the SAN before creative work begins… it seems like important stuff. Very important to backup, and even better, to archive! How can we set up an automatic archive in Archiware P5?

DEFINITION: What is the difference between backup and archive? In the media and entertainment industry I would define backup as a continuous data protection of live data on a production volume, while archive is a copy of a finished project or original media that will be removed from the production volume and must kept safe for future retrieval. Backups will roll over (a new full backup every week, or month) and if that is all we had, then footage or projects that are done and gone off the SAN would be then lost. Archive separates out the finished projects or source material as needing an independent safekeeping. P5 Archive also has the option of creating a mini-MAM type database of proxy files that can be easily viewed in a web browser for quick identification of files to be restored.

So, how do we set up an automatic archive in Archiware P5? We want it to be automatic so we don’t have to think about it, since manually archiving like backups can be forgotten. If we set up a watch folder on the SAN then we just have to instruct everyone to drop their camera masters and other source files into the folder when they copy to the SAN and P5 will automatically archive them to an incremental tape archive. Wow. That’s awesome.

Tips and Tricks: If you edit with Final Cut Pro X then I recommend using it to make Camera Archives (a verified copy of the footage from the original card or drive) then placing this in the watch folder. If you’re using Adobe’s Premiere workflow, then Prelude can make a verified copy as well, but not in the same way exactly. This will be the subject of another post. Stay tuned.

What does an automatic archive look like?

P5 Archive watch folder

P5 Archive watch folder

Requirements:

  1. Pool (designated tapes, or a disk, for archive)
  2. Index (could be the archive default index, or a unique new index)
  3. Plan (an archive plan specifies the pool and index used as well as the what and how)

P5 Archive General Setup Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 1.46.50 PM

Tips and Tricks: If you’re generating QT previews then you’ll want to move your index off of the default, or else you might fill up your system hard drive with movie files and then your backup server won’t boot. No, I never done this. OK, trust me it will happen 🙂

Tips and Tricks: Make sure to set up a backup job of the Archive index. This is a safety measure. The archive index is not saved to the tape in the same way backup jobs information. You need to create a backup job specifically to save your archive index. But you’re already running a backup job to backup your Archiware main index, right? Uh huh, thought so.

Tips and Tricks: When creating the archive pool set it at 512KB media block size for faster archiving of big video files.

Archive Index:

Use the advanced options to create a new Archive Index, select its location and optionally create new additional fields to help searching for archived projects.

P5 Archive Db config Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 1.45.53 PM

Archive options:

Incremental or full? QT previews, yes or no? For an automatic archiving set up I suggest incremental archive and no QT previews. Using previews is up to you (and your disk space available), so plan accordingly.

P5 Archive Options Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 1.46.59 PM

P5 Archive Preview Gen Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 1.47.02 PM

If you have any questions or need help setting this up please do not hesitate to contact me. In the meantime, I’ll work on a nice PDF doc to summarize the setup. Download a demo of Archiware P5 and give it a whirl. You’ll see that it’s super easy to create an automatic archive location on your SAN and your editors will thank you when you can restore their files that they need (when they need it!).