Xsan and the acfs (Apple Clustered File System) volumes that Xsan controls can be utilized by Windows and Linux clients. The Windows setup is fairly straight forward, so here we're going to cover setting up a Linux client to mount an Xsan volume using StorNext. First, buy StorNext. Second, register StorNext. Third, make sure your StorNext client can ping the metadata controller over the metadata network by whatever IP address is . Once these items are all done then you can move on to getting ready.

For starters, go to your Metadata Controller and Backup Metadata Controller and use the cvfsid command. Copy the contents and go to this site, completing the form using the output from cvfsid: http://Prodreg.quantum.treehousei.com/login.aspx

Once you get the information back from Quantum add it to the /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/config/license.dat file on your Metadata Controllers and reboot them. Now you're ready to setup your clients. To do so you will need the .auth_secret file and fsnameservers file from the Metadata Controllers and the StorNext rpm client installer.

From each client, first verify that you can ping the Metadata Controllers. Then, extract the rpm (or you could use gunzip to extract):

tar xf sn_dsm_linuxRedHat40AS_x86_64_client.tar.gz

Next, install the rpm:

rpm -ivh sn_dsm_linuxRedHat40AS_x86_64_client.tar

Now copy the .auth_secret file and fsnameservers file to the /usr/cvfs/config directory created by the installer. Then use the cvlabel -l command to verify that you can see all of the LUNs that make up the volume. Also verify that you can ping both (or all if you have more than 2) of the Metadata Controllers by IP address one more time for good measure. Finally, add cvfs to the list of file systems in the PRUNEFS field in the /etc/updatedb.conf file.

Now you're ready to try and mount up the volume. To do so, let's create a folder in the /mnt directory called the same thing as your volume name (for this example we'll use a volume name of Xsan). Next, open your /etc/fstab and add the following line:

Xsan               /mnt/Xsan              cvfs          verbose=yes 0 0

Now try and mount the volume using the following command:

mount -t cvfs Xsan /mnt/Xsan

If it works then you can reboot and life will be good. If the entry in the fstab causes any problems you can put a # in front of it to disable it. Enjoy!