• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Xsan

    Use A Serial Interface with Promise Arrays

    Many of us use a Keyspan Serial adapter to manage devices with serial ports on them. Those who find you need to console into devices but hate the fact that you have to either use Zterm (which is no longer maintained) or boot a Windows Virtual Machine will find an application called goSerial pretty handy. GoSerial makes a Keyspan serial to usb adaptor, connected with a null modem cable, useful. You will be in CLI heaven in moments. goSerial can be downloaded here. You can also use the screen command. The screen command will open a virtual terminal and provide the functionality of an old DEC VT100 terminal. Screen is…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix,  Xsan

    Remove StorNext FX From RHEL

    When you remove a RHEL system with StorNext FX running on it from the network that has an Xsan the system won’t boot properly any longer. There are two things that need to happen in order to get around this. When done proactively the system can safely be moved. When done reactively, you’ll need to boot using the “I” key and disable all of the cvfs and fsmpm entries during the boot process. Once booted, or if being done proactively, edit fstab and then remove the cvfs files. First, we’re going to edit /etc/fstab. Simple open it in vi and then put a # in front of each line that…

  • Xsan

    Enable and Disable the Xsan Debug Log

    You can gather information manually about an Xsan volume using the cvgather command. This occurs per filesystem. For example, to run on a volume named krypted, use the following command: cvgather -f krypted -o /temp/krypted.debug You can also enable the debug log to get much more detailed information about each transaction to/from the volume and metadata controllers. To enable the debug log, use the cvdb command. The -g option will show the state of the debugger. The -e option will enable debugging and -d disables. So, to see the status of the debugger: cvdb -g To enable debugging: cvdb -e To disable debugging: cvdb -d To drop files into syslog:…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  SQL,  Xsan

    Fix Table Corruption In MySQL

    Corruption happens. Sometimes, it’s little things that cause problems. With MySQL, the mysql command line tool has long held the answer for easy corruption issues. There are a number of tools to repair corruption, but the place to start is the REPAIR command within that trusty mysql command line tool. To start, let’s try a backup. In this case, I’m going to use a tool those of us who deal with Media Assets frequently tinker with, CatDV. I’m going to backup the databases with a simple mysqldump command, defining the user and then piping the data out to some backup file, which in this case is catdvbak on the desktop:…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    MDSChannelPeerCreate and Shared Volumes

    These two errors: com.apple.AppleFileServer[8123] MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument MDSChannelPeerRef MDSChannelPeerCreate(CFAllocatorRef, CFDictionaryRef): (os/kern) invalid argument I see them frequently when we’re using dynamic or shared storage (e.g. Xsan or removable media) to share volumes between multiple computers and then share those shared volumes to clients through a network sharing protocol (e.g. afp or smb). They usually mean that the system doesn’t have enough permissions to do those MDSChannelPeerCreate processes. Therefore, we need to open those permissions up a little and then let the file sharing services restart. I usually do it this way: serveradmin stop afp serveradmin stop smb chown -R root:staff /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.fseventsd chmod -R 770 /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.fseventsd chown -R root:staff /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.Spotlight-V100…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Xsan

    Update the Promise Vtrak Firmware Using SSH

    Updating the firmware on Promise arrays is straight forward enough from the WebPAM. But what happens if a firmware update goes funky and you can’t get into the WebPAM any longer (ah, the joys of beta testing)? Well, you can always download an older firmware and reload it provided you can ssh or telnet into the host. Download from http://www.promise.com/support/download.aspx?m=93&region=en-global for your given model. Then, you need the firmware accessible to the Promise chassis via tftp. A simple tftp GUI tool is available at http://ww2.unime.it/flr/tftpserver. Once configured, log into the Promise array and then use the ptiflash command to update the firmware. In the following command we’ll use the -s option to identify…

  • cloud,  FileMaker,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  Time Machine,  Xsan

    Obtain Information From Watchman Monitoring Using a Script

    Watchman Monitoring is a tool used to monitor computers. I’ve noticed recently that there’s a lot of traffic on the Watchman Monitoring email list that shows people want a great little (and by little I mean inexpensive from a compute time standpoint) monitoring tool to become a RMM (Remote Management and Monitoring) tool. The difference here is in “Management.” Many of us actually don’t want a monitoring tool to become a management tool unless we are very deliberate about what we do with it. For example, that script that takes a machine name of ‘rm -Rf /’ that some ironic hipster of a user decided to name their hard drive…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    New Things To Come In Xsan 3.0 & Beyond!

    It seems like about once a year I have to see threads like the recent one on the Xsan Mailing List from Apple (yes, that one hasn’t been deprecated juuuust yet). This type of thread is really just FUD. People say “Xsan is going away” or “Apple doesn’t care about us” or something like that. But, in order to be compatible with some of the later versions of StorNext, Xsan is in the process of an underlying update that most likely haven’t noticed. The first thing is that all of the binaries of gone back into /System/Library/Filesystems, now located in /System/Library/Filesystems/acfs.fs/Contents/bin (or if not, symlinked). The second is that we have…

  • Xsan

    Restart Xsan Services

    Sometimes you just need to restart the Xsan services on a system. For example, you rm the contents of /Library/Preferences/Xsan and don’t feel like restarting a computer and waiting for all that ProTools boot junk to fire up. So, you can just restart the services: launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.xsan.plist launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.xsan.plist Also, I now always disable Xsan in System Preferences prior to doing the restart of services. Otherwise, I find cruft happens…