Automate it! Hedge API example apps

Posted on April 2, 2019 by macvfx

Quick post to talk about some fun I’ve been having with the new Hedge API.

Background: Hedge is an awesome app for securely copying Camera Cards to multiple destinations to ensure data integrity and safety of the original footage. Hedge is one part of a workflow I build for my clients. Hedge is the first step in ensuring an easy and convenient transition from the cameras to the SAN to the tape archive powered by Archiware P5.

TL;DR

Using AppleScript and Automator I have built some apps to quickly set the file naming and data integrity preferences as we want them to be. And also quickly change them to something else depending on the needed workflow.

API or Clickety click click

Copying camera cards copies is what we use Hedge for. Certain preferences like logs or receipts are great to have to ensure the copy succeeded. Also file naming conventions are good to have. Set and forget, right? But what if you did forget? Or if you’re new and don’t know the convention or you don’t read documentation. What do we do? One way to solve this is build an app that launches Hedge and sets the correct preferences. And if we want to copy USB sticks or something else then we can launch another app that prepares Hedge with a different set of preferences. For extra points we just ask the user what they want with a nice dialog box and just do that.

hedge

Automator

Automator is awesome. Create workflows, apps, or services amongst many other things. For more info on Automator check out Apple’s official docs or this unofficial website of resources.

For this quick testing I used two AppleScripts with different preferences and settings defined. One for camera card copying and another for USB sticks that need different preferences set. The fancy automator app just calls the needed AppleScript. Make two apps and you have two different workflows without having to explain to users which prefs get set for what, or how the file naming should go to be consistent.

Example 1: Cam Card script (snippet)

Example 2: USB card copy (snippet)

Automator can do many things. Call AppleScripts, Run shell scripts, pop-up dialog boxes etc and this is just a simple example of building single purpose apps to set Hedge via its new API. Very cool and so many possibilities.

AppleScript

What if we could just build one app which asked the user what they wanted to do? We can do that!

Choose “Cam” and the appropriate preferences are set and file naming conventions applied.

Choose “USB” and a different set of preferences are set. Magic.

How do we do this? This piece of AppleScript chains an action to a response or button choice. Run a script or choose an action. The possibilities are endless. And thanks to the Hedge API we can set preferences on or off, and set destinations or many other things. We can do them programmatically and we can ensure they are set correctly. Fun times!

AppleScript vs POSIX:

I updated my AppleScript code with the POSIX path of the scripts it wants to load. It’s a major improvement! I had packaged up my scripts and my Hedge Setup app with munkipkg then deployed through Munki but when I demoed it — nothing worked…. because the start up disk drive was named something else. The fix: set a variable to be the POSIX path (Unix path in AppleScript friendly format).

Scripting and App Building

I hope that helped. We can do a lot of the same things with Python and in my testing I was working with a script written in python3 but since that’s not shipping on Macs in the current version of macOS by default (not yet!) then AppleScript was the quickest way to get this done. This is not restricted to AppleScript. Using Automator and your favourite scripting language you can build apps for your clients, co-workers, friends and family.

A note about the Hedge API:

There are two major calls I use in my scripts “setDestination” and “setPreferences”

The “setDestination” call looks like this:

open ‘hedge://actions?json=[{“setDestination”:{“path”:”/Volumes/LaCie/Testing/Test1″}},{“token”:”1234567890123345555″}]’

Note: the token is generated for you when you have a Pro license.

The “the setPreferences” call uses plist keys.

Note: I’ll have more say about using the actual Hedge API after it is officially announced.

Updating the P5 client on the Jellyfish

Posted on August 7, 2018 by macvfx

You’ve successfully installed Archiware’s P5 backup and archiving software on your backup server following my previous blog posts and after it has run smoothly for a while you decided to upgrade the version of P5 on your server, but how do you do this on the Lumaforge Jellyfish storage? I’m glad you asked.

There are a couple of ways to update your P5 agent, and I will show you the built in way in Archiware’s P5 software. Surprisingly after many years of using P5 I have never used this method before. I’ve been using Munki for years to upgrade all software on my Mac clients including P5 and on Linux and Solaris servers I’ve just done it by hand. Install over top of the previous version and voila upgrade! But what if you didn’t want to ssh in as root and just install over top, what if there was a better way? I present to you the official “Update client” dialog box. It’s nice.

Update-p5-jellyish-1

Updating client software assumes you’ve set up clients in the P5 server clients section, This is needed when you want to use these server agents to designate their attached storage as a backup, archive or sync source. And also, this assumes you’ve updated your server.

P5 client update Jellyfish 2 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.40.03 PM

During the update process there are some nice dialog boxes to let you know what is happening.

P5 client update Jellyfish 4 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.44.34 PM

And afterwards you can test your client with a Ping test.

P5 client update Jellyfish 3 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.44.27 PM

Success! Looks like we’ve updated our client successfully. How wonderful. And no need to mess about in Terminal with a root shell. No telling what kind of trouble we could get into with those elevated privileges…. much safer this way.

Thanks Archiware for making this great software. I depend on it every day.

P5 on the Jellyfish: Archiving Gotchas

Posted on May 14, 2018 by macvfx

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.

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.

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…

Or maybe not!

Install P5 on the Jellyfish

Posted on May 14, 2018 by macvfx

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

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.

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.

More Jellyfish P5

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

I don’t get High — Sierra!

Posted on November 17, 2017 by macvfx

Friends don’t let friends install macOS High Sierra in production. Don’t get High, Sierra.

macOS 10.13 was released on Sep 25, 2017, and almost two months later with only one point release update, it’s still too new for production. Download it on a test machine or two or more, test it with your apps and systems, file bug reports and radars, but for the love of all that is Python and Monty! don’t run it on your production Xsan. Well, at least not yet. Wait until next year. Or as long as you can. Or until the new iMac Pro is released with 10.13 pre-installed or wait until they ship the new Final Cut Pro X 10.4 that may or may not require macOS High Sierra.

With that out of the way, I’ve just upgraded the production Xsan to … macOS Sierra. Yes, macOS 10.12.6 is stable and it’s a good time to install last year’s macOS release. Time to say good bye to macOS el Capitan 10.11.6, we hardly knew ya. Besides guaranteed security updates, stability and the annoying newness of a changed macOS, what else is there? In Xsan v5 they introduced a new “ignore permissions” checkbox for your Xsan volumes. Looking forward to that feature in production. No more Munki onDemand nopkg scripts to run chmod. No more tech support requests for folders, files, FCP X projects that won’t open because someone else used it, owns it, touched it. We’ll see how that pans out. I’ll let you know.

Upgrading Xsan to v5

Step 1. Back up your data

You’re doing this, right? I’m using Archiware P5 Backup to backup the current projects to LTO tape. I’m using Archiware P5 sync to sync the current Xsan volumes to Thunderbolt RAIDs, and using Archiware P5 Archive (and Archive app) to archive completed projects to the LTO project archive. That’s all I need to do, right?

Step 2. Back up your servers

Don’t forget the servers running your SAN! I use Apple’s Time Machine to backup my Mac Mini Xsan controllers. External USB3 drive. I also use another Mac Mini in target disk mode with Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the server nightly. (Hat tip to Alex Narvey, a real Canadian hero). And of course I grab the Xsan config with hdiutil and all the logs with cvgather. Because, why not?! For Archiware P5 backup server I also have a python scripts to backup everything, another scripts to export a readable list of tapes, and BackupMinder to rotate the backups. Add some rsync scripts and you’re golden.

Step 3. Upgrade the OS

Unmount the Xsan volume on your clients or shut them down, disconnect the fibre channel. Do something like that. Stop your volume. Download the macOS Sierra installer from the App Store. Double click upgrade. Wait. Or use Munki. I loaded in the macOS 10.12.6 installer app into Munki and set it up as an optional install to make this portion of the upgrade much quicker and cleaner.

In my case after the OS was upgraded I checked the App Store app for any Apple updates (you can also use Munki’s Managed Software Center to check) and of course there were some security updates. In this case the security upgrade hung on a slow network connection and the server crashed. Server down! I had to restore from Time Machine backup to the point where I just upgraded the server. It took some extra time but it worked (can’t wait for next year’s mature APFS / Time Machine and restoring from snapshots instead).

Step 4. Upgrade Server

After macOS is upgraded you’ll need to upgrade the Server.app or just upgrade the services used by Server (even those not used by Server get upgraded).

update server Screen Sharing Picture November 13, 2017 at 11.40.29 AM PST

updated server Screen Sharing Picture November 13, 2017 at 11.40.51 AM PST

Step 5. Upgrade the Xsan

Bur first we have to restore the Xsan config. Don’t panic! It may invoke bad memories of data loss and restoring from backups. Xsan PTSD is real.

Step 6. Upgrade the rest

Next you have to upgrade the Xsan volumes.

Xsan-volume-needs-upgrade

New version of Xsan, ch-ch-changes! Ignore permissions check box will remount the xsan with the “no-owners” flag. Let’s test this out.

Xsan edit volume Remote Desktop Picture November 17, 2017 at 1.52.40 PM PST

Xsan Ignore Ownership Remote Desktop Picture November 17, 2017 at 1.52.07 PM PST

Upgrade the OS and Server app on the backup controller. Upgrade the OS on the clients using Munki or App Store if you like doing it the hard way. Ha Ha.

Step 7. Enjoy

Plug those Thunderbolt to Fibre adapters back in, mount those Xsan volumes and be happy.

Step 8. Wait for the complaints

The next day the editors walked in and went straight to work with Final Cut Pro X. No one noticed anything. Xsan upgraded. Workstation macOS upgraded. Everything appeared to be the same and just worked. Thankless task but well worth it.

Reference: Apple’s iBook guide here

My Thunderbolt Nightmare

Posted on August 1, 2017 by macvfx

It was a dark and stormy night of cables and capacitors when suddenly I heard the door knocking, or was something falling of a shelf? I was in a cramped server room, if you’d call it that, and I was day dreaming, sorry, night terrorizing, of days gone past when I worked in nice big well ventilated server rooms with proper enterprise gear. Oh wait, did I really dream that? Did it really happen? Maybe it was less well ventilated and there were cables strewn about the tall 42U shelves and sometimes we found a Mac hidden underneath spaghetti. Sometimes. I vaguely remember the long shiny metal servers, they talked to me, they sang, a whiny pitch of whale song. Dream on, dream on.

Now. Today. Apple Music on my iPhone plays every single Arcade Fire album in a long playlist, in order. And I follow the white rabbit of Thunderbolt cables. This is my thunderbolt nightmare. Dead drive in a Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus unit, web ticket filed for registered hardware. Legacy. That’s the word they used. Where’s Marshall McLuhan when you need a proper redux of the shit storm you’re in? Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C and everything is possible. Can’t wait to step into that confusing identity crisis. OK, back to the present day when I stared at the red blinking drive, a replacement drive from not long ago dead again, sitting in the last row of a now legacy Pegasus R6 unit. RAID 5, the most dangerous kind, this is what stood between me and uncertainty. The worst kind of RAID. Well, not as bad RAID 0. Raid nothing. Raid 5 is one bad drive away from a bad day. Backups? Hmm, I got those, I got plenty of those, but I don’t want to be tested today. No, not today. Not this bloody day.

I open the Pegasus utility and the GUI wants an update. Hmm, that’s not in autopkg, I think. Why is out of date? Munki let me down. I start to drift, to side shift into adding newer better recipes to autopkg, to tweaking my Munki repo, to what sessions would be awesome at the next MacDevOps:YVR conference. Gee whiz, I love open source, and everyone in the Mac Admins community…. Snap out of! I slap myself in the face. I was hallucinating. Stay on task. I update the Pegasus utility. I stare at the critical reports from one of the three R6 units attached to this Mac Mini server. Did I say server? But it’s so small, so little. It works. It’s magical, kinda neat. Until you stare too close at the back. The Thunderbolt cables go from the Mac Mini to the first Pegasus unit to the SANlink fibre channel adapter to the LTO 6 tape library to the next Pegasus utility to the second SANlink adapter to a third and final Pegasus RAID unit. What’s is going on? Where does this cable go? Let me just follow it to the next jumping off point. My brain slows, the lack of oxygen in this cold machine room start to affect my thinking. I lose my way.

I download the report for the Pegasus unit. I had to unlock a pretty neat lock icon and click on the save report. I upload it to the web support and add it to the ticket. Tech support gets backs to me in a day and said all is good, and to carry on. I can’t. The drive is dead. What are they not seeing? It’s right in front of me. I download the report again. Again the same response. Fine. It’s time to stop messing around and pop open Terminal. Loading up promiseutil I check out the options and switches and get into an argument with myself about the currently valid optionals of letters and numbers that are required. I check my notes, online knowledge base, and try again. It’s broken. It doesn’t work. Stumbling around the command line typing imprecisely incorrect statements gets nowhere fast. I realize that there’s no way for the cli utility to properly change its focus to the broken unit with the busted drive. Both the GUI and the binary are stuck on the one R6 unit and won’t see what’s in front of my face.

I call tech support. This is humiliating. This was supposed to be easy. Drive dead, drive reported, drive ordered, drive replaced, then no one the wiser. Data saved, not dead. Backups not tested. Not today. No, not today. Tech support treats me like the imaginary newbie IT people sometimes treat everyone with. He repeats his instructions to me. He is polite. Download the report. I can’t. It won’t work. Unplug the unit. Plug it into something else. I can’t. The cables. The Thunderbolt cables are everywhere. It’s magical, and daisy-chained, and stuck. “Can I remote in and see?” he asks, hoping to resolve this quickly. Sorry. That’s impossible. Even if I thought it was a good idea. I remind him that I have a dead drive. That’s why I called. I want to get a replacement drive. “Sorry sir that legacy unit is not under support most likely,” I know that. I realize that now. That I wasted my time. It happens sometimes. The truth is staring at you. You need a mirror to see. “You need to order compatible drive from the compatibility list.” I am a well spring of emotions. I thank him. I am nice. He was polite. But now I know what I need to do. Oh wait, what? Order a drive now! Order two.

McLuhan never had a chance to evaluate Thunderbolt storage technology but the insane genius and simplicity of Thunderbolt reduced expensive enterprise fibre channel storage to the dust bin. Magical SAN for video editing with a Mac Mini and Thunderbolt RAIDs. Cheap enough to buy with a departmental credit card, fewer meetings to attend, more films to shoot and edit. Backup, archive, repeat. McLuhan would have no doubt reminded me that the tetrad of technology would have flipped Thunderbolt on its head, Fibre channel never went into a dust bin, but was firmly relegated to well cooled storage room, and long ago legacy drives in the enterprise units are humming a long while the cursing wind and emotions swell over the Thunderbolt mountain. Fibre channel just became cool again. Retro smart.

Archiware P5 and Synology NAS.

Posted on March 4, 2017 by macvfx

Update: As of version 5.4.3 there is an official P5 add-on package for Synology NAS

Archiware P5 available for Synology

Note: The P5 app for Synology NAS first debuted with P5 v.5.3.3

On the Archiware P5 new-features page there’s a blurb about the Synology NAS integration:

From Version 5.3.3, Archiware P5 supports Synology NAS devices without restrictions.

Synology NAS can serve as a data source or target for P5 Synchronize, P5 Backup and P5 Archive. The Archiware P5 application can now be installed on the Synology NAS itself.

Thanks to the snapshot capability of the DSM platform, powerful enterprise Synology NAS devices can also be used as repository for Backup2Go. This setup opens the possibility of introducing a professional data security solution at an affordable price point.

Let’s look in closer detail how to install Archiware P5 on a new Synology NAS.

For this post I have a new Synology 1515+ NAS, installed with five 6TB hard drives (It is very easy to install hard drives. No tools required). Note: I’ve purchased the NAS with my own money and was not paid to write this article.

At the time of this blog post the latest Synology DSM release is 6.1 and Archiware P5 is at version 5.4.2.

Step 1. Download Synology package from Archiware.com/download

Download Archiware P5 for Synology

awpst542spk

Requirements are DSM 5.2+ and Intel x86 64-Bit CPU only. (i.e. Atom but not Marvell).

Step 2. Find and Log into your NAS

Find your new NAS with the Synology Assistant app or use this handy website link:

Find your NAS

I had no luck with the app (it found my existing NAS, but not the new one). Using the website I was able to quickly locate the new NAS that I need to log into and setup. Very nice feature.

synology-1515-setup-welcome2crop

Step 3. Install the new DSM

Install or update new software. You will be prompted to go through the initial setup to prepare your new NAS.

synology-1515-install-diskstation-manager2

Step 4. Set up a new volume

Chose the Btrfs or ext4 filesystem. Btrfs supports snapshots, replication, and much more.

synology-1515-btrfs-setup

Step 5. Monitor the volume setup

Verifying the hard disks will take a moment. Take a break here.

synology-1515-storage-manager

Step 6. Open Package Center

packagecenter

Step 7. Install manually

Install Archiware P5 by selecting the “install manually” option to upload the awpst542.spk downloaded file from archiware.com

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-upload

Step 8. Agree to continue.

Load the Synology P5 installer by agreeing to continue with this “unknown” publisher.

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-unknown

Sep 9. Agree to trust the installer

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-license

Step 10. Confirm the Install

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-confirm-install

Step 11. P5 is now running on the Synology NAS.

Hooray! P5 is now installed. Select the app to examine the details.

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-installed

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center2

Step 12. Examine the option to stop or uninstall the P5 application

synology-1515-archiware-p5-package-center-stop-uninstall

Step 13. Login to the P5 server running on NAS

To login to P5 open a new tab. Pay attention to the port number: “20,000” (vs 8000 on other platforms such as Solaris, Linux, OSX etc).

synology-1515-archiware-p5-port

Step 14. Set up your NAS as a client on another Server

To test the new Synology 1515+ NAS I then set up the NAS as a client on another P5 server, and set up a P5 Sync job to copy data from server with a ZFS based filesystem to the Synology NAS with a btrfs volume.

Testing: Set up the new client in P5 with a name and IP address, then set up a new sync job with source and destination. Start now. Watch the bits fly through the ether. Be happy.

Step 15. Other things to configure

To make your new NAS is working smoothly don’t forget to set up the email notifications, and set up some AFP, SMB, or NFS shares as required.

Take some time to explore the Package Center app and see what other great applications are offered on the Synology NAS.

Synology makes a great low-cost NAS appliance. For SMB or production setups I would recommend two or more (for redundancy, hot or cold spares, disaster recovery, offsite backups/replication). With P5 installed you can Sync your server data to a NAS for onsite or offsite backups, backup your NAS to tape, or use the NAS for your client workstation backups using Backup2Go. Using the new Btrfs filesystem provides many of the same advances as ZFS, including snapshots and replication, over traditional filesystems such as ext4 and hfs which sadly lack these features.

Conclusion:

The Synology NAS is a great experience. Adding Archiware P5 is a recommended way to include this NAS as part of any good backup, archive or DR (disaster recovery) scenario. Two thumbs up. Way up.

References:

Archiware P5 new features

Synology DSM

Watchman Monitoring + Archiware P5

Posted on June 2, 2016 by macvfx

I’ve been a little busy lately. I’m working on some scripts for Watchman Monitoring that alert when Archiware P5 needs attention. It’s really much more exciting than it sounds. 🙂

WatchmanArchiwareP5

Archiware P5 plugin (included with Watchman Client 6.6.0)

UPDATE: The Archiware P5 plugin is now included with the Watchman Monitoring client version 6.6.0

Use the link above to read up about Watchman Monitoring and the Archiware P5 plugin.

This plugin is now part of Watchman Monitoring thanks to Allen and his team! Of course, big thanks to a lot of help from Python magician and MacDevOps:YVR colleague, Wade Robson. I couldn’t have finished this plugin without his help. Merci, mon ami. (Early help to get started with this project is thanks to Scott Neal, automation expert and programming wizard. Thank you so much Scott, and thanks for the tasty Portland beer!).

Watchman Monitoring is a group of plugins that will warn when drives are failing, computers have restarted unexpectedly or backups are not running. All reporting goes to a beautiful web interface in the cloud which can keep a history of plugin issues. Watchman allows for integration with ticket systems and multiple users including clients and IT staff that can keep track of what’s up with their workstations, and servers.

Watchman Monitoring helps me keep tabs of major issues at all my clients before they become disasters. I even use it in discovery for new clients to see what issues exist but are ignored or unknown.

Since I set up a lot of SAN storage for my clients, and I use Archiware P5 for backups and archives I realized I needed to write a plugin for Watchman Monitoring that alerts me to issues. Instead of remoting in with VPN to each and every client every day to check on backups the only alternative is to automate it. These scripts watch the LTO tape drives and emails when they need cleaning, or warns when running jobs need tapes, if workstations haven’t backed up in a while or if tape pools need more tapes. And in Beta 2 we’ve added a check to see if the P5 maintenance support needs to be renewed to give you time to renew it before it expires. As well as better alerts for issues with running jobs, and lots of bug fixes.

We have it working on Mac servers running Archiware P5 and the next step is Linux, and the Unix family. Later on, Watchman will port it to Windows. The scripts are written in Python which is great for portability (except to Windows. Ha ha). And the P5 Watchman plugins should eventually run everywhere that Archiware P5 runs (OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows).

The best part of writing plugins for Watchman Monitoring is the great help that Allen and the whole team at Watchman have given us been throughout our development of these Archiware P5 plugins. And of course everyone at Archiware and Mike at PVT have been super helpful in explaining the use of the nsdchat cli for Archiware P5, even going so far as to add some features we needed to nsdchat when we explained how useful they’d be for this project. Mille mercis. Vielen danke.

Using GitHub to check code in, document business logic, write code, build a wiki and then track issues that need bug fixes or enhancement requests has been an adventure. It all starts with an problem that you want to be alerted for. It’s easy enough to add custom plugins to Watchman Monitoring you just need some ideas, a programmer (or two) and some time for testing, debugging, more testing and time. Did I mention you need lots of time? Ha ha

And now for a sneak peak of the Archiware P5 beta 2 plugins for Watchman Monitoring.

Watchman nicely lists the new warnings and expirations for quickly getting to the issues you need to see.
Expirations are tracked with Watchman. In this case we note the date when the maintenance for Archiware P5 needs to be renewed. Don’t want to miss that!
Server info is good to know. Uptime, port used, and what exactly is licensed.
The LTO tape drive is the heart of any tape library, and alerting when it needs cleaning is very important.
Other plugins watch the tape pools, running and completed jobs, as well as Backup2Go (workstation backup).

Watchman Monitoring Archiware P5 B2Go plugin X

Watchman Monitoring Archiware P5 Pools plugin X

Watchman Monitoring Archiware P5 Jobs plugin X

Automatic Archive in Archiware P5

Posted on October 14, 2014 by macvfx

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

Requirements:

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

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.

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.

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!).

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