A blog about archives, storage and everything

Category: Production

  • 2015 in review

    The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog, but nobody wants to read no stinkin’ reports so let me just sum it all up: Xsan, Munki, Thunderbolt, Archives. Or is that all one word? Thunderbolt Xsan Munki Archives! That’s better.

    Here’s an excerpt from the report that no one will read:

    The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    Surprisingly, or not, that opera would be about Xsan. Yes, Apple’s Xsan is still alive, and Apple even added new features with OS X 10.11 El Capitan. I’m still building Xsan shared storage SANs and upgrading old ones to new versions. That was one of the good news stories of 2015 for me.

    You can build an Xsan with one or two Mac Minis and add your storage of choice. That used to mean more often than not the fibre channel storage from Promise. A great choice for larger deployments, the x30 Vtraks are solid.

    But the real shocker for me in 2015 was stumbling upon the Accusys Thunderbolt SAN RAID, the A16T2-Share. For more than half off the price of a similar fibre channel storage RAID here’s a magical box powered by unicorns that has four (4) Thunderbolt connections. Plug one Thunderbolt cable into that Mac Mini, format the raid, setup Apple’s Xsan, and then plug the other three (3) Thunderbolt cables into iMacs, Mac Pro, MacBook Pros or any Xsan clients. Wow. Awesome.

    Suddenly we have a game changer. An affordable SAN storage RAID for real block-level storage. Now more than ever we can afford to have true collaborative workflows for video editors and anyone in the creative. If you need to work together with fast connections to a shared pool then building an Xsan got much more attractive.

    Disclaimer: I got a chance to test the Accusys A16T2-Share. And I would be crazy to recommend something without testing it thoroughly. This was used for several weeks by video editors in production. It was much faster than our 4GB fibre channel storage, of course, but it was also faster than our 8GB FC storage. Speed tests showed we got close to 1GB/sec, and even when it was 97% full we got 700MB/sec. Sa-weet.

    I look forward to seeing what Accusys bring to NAB in 2016. What new box will they show up with? I hope for more than 4 client ports and faster Thunderbolt 3. Only 82 more sleeps till we all find out.

    Apple’s Xsan and Accusys Thunderbolt storage A16T2-Share were big stars of 2015, but what else stood out? The two other bright shiny lights were Archiware’s new P5 Archive app, and Vidispine’s VidiXplore cloud based MAM. More on those in posts to follow. Both of these products have transformed workflows for editors. Stay tuned!

  • Move over El Capitan, hello Yosemite!

    With all this talk about El Capitan, Apple’s as of yet unreleased version 10.11 of OS X, and its wondrous new features in Xsan, I think it might be time to upgrade to last year’s breakthrough version of OS X, Yosemite. Sure, you might be excited by the press releases for the built-in DLC in El Capitan but seriously sane folks stay 1-year behind the bleeding nose upgrades provided by Apple. So if OS X 10.11 is all the rage before its released it must be time to seriously consider upgrading that working Xsan running OS X 10.8 or OS X 10.9.

    In my case, I upgraded a working Xsan running on Mac Minis and OS X 10.8.5. Here are some screenshots from the process. As always think worked better than I could have expected, and it is a much easier process that one expects. But stay sharp kids, danger lurks when you wake the dreamer…. Upgrading a SAN is serious business and doing anything like this without proper backups is taking your life in your own hands. In my case, full disk backups on Promise Pegasus RAIDs and full tape backups using Archiware P5.

    Download the Yosemite installer form the App Store. Install. Download the new Server.app from the App Store. Install. Now upgrade your Xsan. That’s it. You’re done. No surprises, aren’t you happy? Ha ha. I’m kidding. The fun is just getting started.

    If you’re actually following along, this isn’t a step by step recipe. Go to Apple’s site and read this Kbase and check out the migration guide.

    Restore Xsan
    Restore Xsan

    Step 1 is to launch the new Server.app, find Xsan Admin. Just kidding, it isn’t there. Enable Xsan, and choose to Restore a previous SAN configuration. That wasn’t hard. High five! Actually, we’re not done yet. Set up OD now. Go!

    Step 2. Set up your Xsan controller as an Open Directory (OD) master. Does’t matter if it’s joined to another domain, Xsan keeps itself organized in OD, so you need it.

    Set up OD
    Set up OD

    Step 3. Admire your upgraded SAN, “how lovely the flowers do smell…. life is good.”

    XSAN LIST
    Xsan list

    Step 4. Where did my Xsan admin go? Where do I add clients? Where are my clients? Huh? What? Why did I upgrade a perfectly working SAN to this version? Ha ha.

    Take it all in, take a good look at what you’ve done to your Xsan. What? Just so the editors could have the latest version of Final Cut Pro (v.10.2.1) which is only compatible with OS X 10.10.4. I see what you’ve done Apple, very clever indeed. Hmm…

    Click on the “Save configuration profile” button and download the profile somewhere. Use this to set up the SAN on your clients. Distribute via Profile Manager or install it manually. Up to you. I haven’t gotten it to work with Munki quite yet. Installing it requires the admin password for the Xsan controller. How convenient.

    When you client is configured you’ll see a Profile in System Preferences. Remove it and your client is un-configured. No more Xsan.prefpane to list volumes and mount or unmount them. Nope. That would be too easy. Learn to love “xsanctl”, as in “xsanctl mount Xsan”. Read some xsanctl tips in this Kbase

    Step 5. Set up a backup Xsan controller. You have one of those, right? In my case, I had a client which I wanted to promote to be a controller.  But first what to do about its status a client of the Xsan?

    backup cannot be client
    backup cannot be client

    Open Server.app, enable Xsan, join current Xsan as a backup controller and set up a replica OD. Confirm, confirm, confirm. Think about what you’re doing, then do it!

    confirm OD replica
    confirm

    Apple wizards are the best wizards, uh, i mean Setup Assistants. No wizards here…. So, you’ve setup a backup Xsan controller, and OD replica, and now look in Server.app. How amazing is that… wait, what? Where’d my Xsan volumes go? Huh? Where are the controllers? Weird. Very strange. Not comforting at all.

    Xsan 4 no SAN list crop 122815

    The Xsan window eventually shows the volumes and controllers, bur geez, almost gave me a heart attack. It’s not like I never seen Xsan go bad before. Xsan 1 nightmare still haunt me. They do. Backups. Need more backups. Archiware P5 Backups, do it now!

    OK, you’ve survived the uncertainty of Xsan upgrades…. But wait more minute… cat the fsnameservers (no, it’s not the name of a band, it’s a command). Check it out. Holy smokes, batman. Xsan 4 by default will set your metatadata network to the public LAN, something that’d would be laughed at years ago, but they do it now by default. Of course, upgrading our SAN kept out metadata network the same. But strangely the Xsan backup controller is set to use the public for metadata when the primary controller is not. WTF.

    Change your metadata network. Read the Kbase, and once again wield xsanctl like a boss.

  • Umask fixes in Yosemite aka OS X 10.10.3 and shared storage

    Finally!

    Yes, Apple has restored the ability to set a user and system umask in OS X 10.10.3. This is a huge fix for users of shared storage. Xsan and all SANs where users want to be able to share files, projects and all things without using ACLs or any LDAP directory. This is great. I am jumping up and down. So happy. So many people wanted this. Anyone using shared storage have been demanding this since the upgrade to Yosemite. 10.10.3 is out today and we will be happy.

    Reference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201684

    tl;dr

    sudo launchctl config user umask nnn

    and

    sudo launchctl config system umask nnn