Archive for the ‘Xsan’ Category

Setting up CHAP on LeftHand w/ CLI

LeftHand Storage uses the cliq command line for configuring their devices. cliq isn’t necessarily interactive and so we end up needing to specify the username, password and IP of the device with each command (although you can setup a key as well if you’re going to be doing automated tasks). One task that I’ve found [...]

InnerPool Video from Active Storage

Posted on April 28, 2010 at 11:36 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Xsan · Tagged with: , , ,

Dot Hill with Xsan

The Promise Vtrak is the only officially supported platform that can be used to provide LUNs to an Xsan. Having said that, there are a number of other storage vendors that are supplying LUNs at this point. And while I don’t really want to speak to that it is worth noting that it brings me [...]

Posted on April 24, 2010 at 8:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Xsan · Tagged with: , , ,

Defining MultiSAN

In Xsan 2, MultiSAN was introduced. MultiSAN allows you to assign different sets of primary, secondary and tertiary metadata controllers to volumes. This provides a performance benefit for some environments that have saturated resources on a given metadata controller. However, MultiSAN does not allow you to build separate SANs. All of the volumes are still [...]

Posted on April 22, 2010 at 7:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X Server, Xsan · Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Post at Xsanity on Active Storage

Posted a little article on Xsanity about the new press releases from Active Storage regarding Innerpool and Active Stats. You can find it here: http://www.xsanity.com/article.php/20100415165329925

Posted on April 16, 2010 at 3:05 pm by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Xsan · Tagged with: , ,

Don’t Defrag the Whole SAN

I see a numer of environments that are running routine defragmentation scripts on Xsan volumes. I do not agree with this practice, but given certain edge cases I have watched it happen. When defragmenting a volume, there is no reason to do so to the entire volume. Especially if much of the content is static [...]

Posted on February 13, 2010 at 9:00 am by admin · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: Xsan · Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Isolating iNodes in Xsan cvfsck Output

I’ve noticed a couple of occasions where data corruption in Xsan causes a perceived data loss on a volume. This does not always mean that you have to restore from backup. Given the cvfsck output, you can isolate the iNodes using the following: cat cvfsck.txt | grep *Error* | cut -c 27-36 > iNodeList.txt Once [...]

Posted on February 12, 2010 at 9:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Xsan · Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Uniq Logs

Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of log files. And sorting through them can be a bit of a pain. However, there are some tools out there to help make this process a bit easier. The first of these is sort. If I have a log that has 1,000 lines, while I like to [...]

Posted on February 10, 2010 at 9:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Unix, Xsan · Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Blessing the blessed

The bless command can be used to read your currently blessed operating system in Mac OS X. You can also leverage it to set an operating system in Mac OS X. Don’t ask why, but I recently needed to read what my blessed operating system was and set my blessed operating system to the same [...]

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 9:00 am by admin · Permalink · One Comment
In: Mac OS X, Mass Deployment, Xsan · Tagged with: , , , ,

Disable Spotlight for Xsan Volumes

I’ve seen a number of Xsan environments spewing tons of errors in regards to Spotlight this and Spotlight that. Yup, that is with Spotlight disabled on the volumes. You can use the mdutil command to help with this. If you have two volumes, then the script to do so would be similar to the following [...]

Posted on February 7, 2010 at 10:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Xsan · Tagged with: , , ,