One of the challenges that we face when building a large Xsan for video environments where we also need to deploy Final Cut is to install Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Studio on all the clients. It can mean a lot of switching out of optical media and kill productivity if you aren’t careful. This is why we started looking to the Xsan to provide some of the speed to the installation process that it will later provide to the clients.
First off, extract the installers or create an image of the disk(s). If you extract the disk then you will need to mount it and then start the installer package, which can be done programmatically (assuming a disk image called FCInstaller.dmg located on an Xsan volume called simply SAN):
hdid /Volumes/SAN/FCInstaller.dmg
installer -verbose -pkg /Volumes/Final Cut Studio Install/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg -target /Volumes/Final Cut Studio 3
Once installed, don’t forget to clean up after yourself by unmounting the drive. This can also be done programatically using the hdiutil command with the detatch option. You can use df or another tool to obtain the device and then unmount based on that device. For example, if df showed a device of /dev/disk3s2 for your installer disk image, then the following would unmount the disk image:
hdiutil detach /dev/disk3s2
If you have multiple disk images then each will need to be mounted and unmounted separately. You can also mount them all manually by simply double-clicking on the dmg files. Performing the installation over point-and-click or programmatically can then be done on a number of Xsan clients concurrently. It provides a means of deploying Final Cut over fibre channel and beats the pants off the previous means of installation, which was mostly to either do optical media, ethernet or over firewire drives moved between stations via sneakernet. This type of deployment will also free up the Ethernet network for any other installers or processes that you are working on at the time.
Also, as you get deployment packages and scripts built, you can host those on the Xsan as well. This allows for fast deployment of any suite. Anyway, hope it saves you a little time…
