Monthly Archives: May 2018

P5 on the Jellyfish: Archiving Gotchas

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TL;DR

Using Archiware P5 to Archive files to tapes is awesome, but watch out for little things you might miss, such as the path to the files and backing up your Archive Db.

P5 Archive on the Jellyfish

Using P5 Archive with the Lumaforge Jellyfish is a great way to preserve your digital archives. See this post for how to set up P5 on the Jellyfish

Using Archiware P5 for archiving makes sense. You want your completed projects and original camera footage on LTO tape. But how do you do archives? There are several different ways, and there be gotchas.

P5 Archive vs P5 Archive app

Using P5 Archive to manually archive completed projects to LTO tape is a process of logging into the server via a web browser and selecting the the project folder you want to archive to tape.

The completed project folder could be on the storage visible to the server or it could be storage the client sees. And that can make a difference. Where the storage is mounted is different on a Mac vs Linux. Its’ the difference between “/Volumes” and “/mnt”.

The same Jellyfish storage, either SMB or NFS, when seen on a Mac is mounted by default at “/Volumes” (this can be changed but for most people leave it at the default). But when archiving the storage via a Jellyfish client you will get “/mnt” path.

p5-smb-test2.png

Using the P5 Archive app, which is a Mac only companion application to P5 Archive, to run the archives you will see the storage archived as “/Volumes”.

This first Archiving gotcha is if you’re archiving the Jellyfish storage with the web application of P5 Archive you will have to find your footage and restore from the “/mnt” path vs if you’re archiving from the P5 Archive app which is running from a Mac and will see and store the footage using the “/Volumes” path.

All this to say that using both ways to archive may double up your footage in your archive which may be unintended. And from a restore in the web browser finding your footage may be confusing if you’re used to seeing it mounted in “/Volumes” and you actually find it under “/mnt”.

Note: the reason to use the P5 Archive app is because of the simplicity of right-clicking files in the finder which are on your storage and telling them to archive right then and there. Files are copied to tape then the original files on the storage are replaced with stub files. Right-click again to restore. Simple.

p5-archive-app-job-monitor.png

Backup your Archive!

Don’t forget to backup your archives. Or rather, your archive Db. A more recent addition is the ability to automate the backups on the Archive index, so don’t forget to enable it.

In the managed index section, choose your Archive index.

Set the target client where the backups are going and the backup directory. Choose a time and don’t forget to enable it (check the checkbox and hit apply before closing the windows).

Note: Repeat this setup for each Archive index you want to backup.

Archive Backup db setup3.png

Monitoring your Archive!

Don’t forget to enable email notifications for your P5 server to get your inbox full of status notifications and errors and other important stuff. But if you want to cut down on email notifications or you have multiple P5 servers (many different clients, perhaps), then you might want to check out Watchman Monitoring and the P5 plugin that is built-in). Find out easily when your tape pools are getting low, the tape drives needs to be cleaned, the support maintenance needs renewing etc. All in one dashboard. How convenient!

Maybe everything is going well…

Watchman-P5-info.png

Or maybe not!

Archiware-P5-Jobs-Watchman-tapes-required.png

 

Install P5 on the Jellyfish

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TL;DR

You can easily install Archiware P5 backup and archive software on a Lumaforge Jellyfish storage server. Once you’ve done that you can backup to tape or disk or the cloud directly or through another P5 server. Backups are good. Archive are good. Restores are better.

P5 install on the Jellyfish (Linux) How-To:

Note: Thank you to Lumaforge’s CTO Eric Altman who gave me some basic instructions to get me going.

Step One: Download the latest Linux P5 rpm file 

http://p5.archiware.com/download

p5-Linux-rpm.png

Copy the downloaded rpm file to the root folder of your SMB or NFS file share.

 

Step Two: Install the rpm file

Open Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish. Login as root or as another appropriate user.

yum localinstall /mnt/Primary/ShareSMB/awpst554.rpm

 

Step Three: Browse to server on port 8000 to test that the server is up

e.g. https://jellyfish:8000

Or in Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish and ping your P5 server

cd /usr/local/aw 

./ping-server

Pinging PresStore application servers...

  lexxsrv pid: 4840 (server is running)

  lexxsrv url: http://127.0.1.1:8000/login 

Pinged 1 from 1 application servers.

 

Step Four: Decide if the Jellyfish storage will be a P5 client or a server.

Note: If configuring the Jellyfish storage as the main P5 server you may wish to set up a user that only has access to the shared volumes.

For my set up the Jellyfish storage is going to act as a P5 client to a main P5 server on a Mac mini (yes, they are useful for something). The Mac mini is this case is the P5 server and is attached to theOverland tape library via a Promise SANlink2 Thunderbolt Fibre Channel adapter.

NEOs-T24-large-new.jpg

macmini-ports.png

 

Step Five: Set up the Jellyfish storage as a P5 client

Log into your P5 server and add the Jellyfish by the IP known to the P5 server. In this case the P5 server is connected via 1GB to the Jellyfish in Port 1.

P5 clients jellyfish setup1.png

Note: You could also choose to plug into the Jellyfish via a 10GB port, but in my setup these 10GB ports are reserved for the edit stations. You should choose what’s appropriate for your setup.

P5 clients jellyfish setup2.png

Resource utilization of P5 on the server is low, topping off generally at 1GB of RAM at peak usage. While this does technically take resources from ZFS caching, the impact should be super minimal.

In my observations the CPU never spiked too high while both serving NFS and SMB mount points to multiple Final Cut Pro X workstations even with backups or archive jobs going to tape at the same time.

jellyfish-cpu-resources-graph.png

More Jellyfish P5

See the follow up post on Archiving gotchas with the Jellyfish here