• Unix,  Windows Server,  Xsan

    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 to be pretty common is to use cliq to enable Chap authentication for volumes. To do so you’ll use the assignVolumeChap verb. Along with the assignVolumeChap verb you will need a number of options, each with an = for the payload of the option and delimited with a space between them. When using the assignVolumeChap…

  • Xsan

    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 joy to watch the ever-expanding number of vendors testing their products for and then marketing to the Xsan community. One that I came across recently is Dot Hill, who did a video showcasing their speedy 2U product at NAB.

  • Xsan

    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 and not changing very often. And if specific files doesn’t have a lot of extents then they are easily skipped. Let’s look at a couple of quick ways to narrow down your defrag using snfsdefrag. The first is by specifying the path. In this case you would specify a -r option and follow that with…

  • Xsan

    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 isolated you can then use the cvfsdb tool to correlate this to file names. For example, if you have an iNode of 0x20643c8 then you can convert this into a file name using the following: cvfsdb> show inode 0x20643c8 The output will be similar to the following: 000: 0100 8000 3f04 0327 5250 2daa 0000…

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  Xsan

    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 initially see any lines that are repeated numerous times so that I can see when servers are throwing a lot of errors, combing through them can get tedious. Sort will help to reduce the volume and organize them in a manner that makes sense. For example, to sort the logs and remove duplicate line entries…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    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 volume. Much like choosing a volume in the Startup Disk System Preference pane when I’m already booted to that volume. With a little help debugging, here’s what I came up, in case anyone : myDisk=”$(/usr/sbin/bless –getBoot)” myDiskOutput=”$(/usr/sbin/diskutil info “$myDisk” | grep “Volume Name” | cut -c 30-60)” bless –mount /Volumes/”$myDiskOutput” –setBoot echo $myDiskUtilOutput > /tmp/booter.txt…

  • Xsan

    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 (assuming they are called A and B): mdutil -i off /Volumes/A mdutil -i off /Volumes/B Later if you decide to implement Spotlight, you can use the following to re-enable indexing: mdutil -i on /Volumes/A mdutil -i on /Volumes/B