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…
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Holy Cow, Batman, My Xsan Volume Is Invisible!
No one could see the Xsan volume. Logged into Xsan Admin, the volume was unmounted for everyone. Mounted the volume and Xsan Admin said it mounted for everyone. No errors in the logs. In a nice place mentally, I stepped away from my desk. The phone rings, no one has access to the volume. Crap, what now? Log in, shows mounted. Log into a client, well, isn’t there. The other volumes are on the desktop. Go to /Volumes and it doesn’t appear there. Go to /Volumes/VOLUMENAME and viola, it’s there. But in the sidebar it’s hidden?!?!?! There aren’t any options in the volume.cfg file in /Library/Preferences/Xsan that deal with this…
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Rorke Aurora Galaxy and Xsan
With Apple bundling Xsan into Lion and opening up more storage options than before, it seems like time to start exploring alternatives to Promise Vtrak’s for Xsan storage. ActiveStorage makes a very nice RAID chassis and should be shipping metadata controller appliances soon. I’ve discussed both here before and they make for very nice kit. But in order to have an ‘ecosystem’ you really need a little biodiversity. And the Xsan environment needs to become more of an ecosystem and less of a vendor lock-in situation. So another option that I’d like to discuss is the Rork Aurora Galaxy. These little firecrackers have a lot of potential upside: 4 8Gbps…
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Installing Windows Clients for Xsan & StorNext
There are a lot of environments that attach Windows client computers to an Xsan or StorNext filesystem. In the past I’ve looked at using different versions of StorNext to communicate with Xsan, but in this article we’re actually going to take a look at Quantum’s StorNext FX2 client software. Before getting started, you’ll want to have the StorNext media, have the serial number added to the metadata controllers, have the HBA (fibre channel card) installed, have the fibre patched into the HBA, have the IP addresses for the metadata controllers documented and have a copy of the .auth_secret file obtainable from the metadata controllers once they’ve been properly licensed. To…
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Adding Xsan Clients to StorNext Environments
There are a lot of people who keep saying that StorNext is the same thing as Xsan. StorNext is similar to Xsan, but not identical. Apple makes their own changes to the StorNext code before recompiling and shipping. One need only look at the output of a cvlabel command on each to see this very quickly. The similarities mean that you can mix and match Xsan clients to StorNext controllers and match up StorNext controllers to Xsan clients (although you can’t match StorNext controllers to Xsan controllers). The differences mean that you might have a tiny amount of work on your hands to get the mix and matched controllers/clients to…
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Replacing Xsan Metadata LUNs
Recently I’ve been noticing a trend where organizations with Xsan (and sometimes StorNext) are replacing older metadata LUNs with newer faster LUNs. This often involves replacing an Xserve RAID that sometimes has tens of thousands of hours of spin time on them with a Promise E-class or an ActiveRAID. The trend isn’t just with people I interact with though, as Duncan McCracken mentioned this at MacSysAdmin 2010 and Kuppusamy Ravindran (aka ravi) mentioned it back in 2008 in a post at Xsanity (he actually went way further and looked at actually splitting Metadata and Journaling, a post that is definitely worth a read). But as the pace seems to quicken…
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Removing A LUN Label in Xsan
In Xsan Admin you can easily label LUNs that are available on your Fibre Channel fabric. Using the cvlabel command, you can also easily label a LUN that isn’t on a Fibre Channel fabric. Labeling a LUN writes data to the LUN, thus allowing Xsan to somewhat mark its territory (insert vivid imagery of an Xsan shaped like a dog taking a whiz on a poor thumb drive). If you then look at that LUN from a Mac OS X system without Xsan installed, the computer will have greyed out options in Disk Utility and will not be able to treat the LUN as a “disk.” You also can’t use…
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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.
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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
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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…