Digital Rebellion's FCS Remover app, available here, is a great way to remove either Final Cut Studio or Final Cut Server in order to avoid reimaging a machine. It grabs all related libraries, frameworks and other barnacles.

Apple has issued Pro Applications Update 2008-003, which updates both Compressor and Qmaster to 3.0.4.

However, some of our clients were reporting more qmaster unresponsiveness than before the update, sometimes rendering qmaster irreparably unresponsive (say that three times fast).

Below then is a script that can completely wipe your install of Qmaster/Compressor. You can then reinstall from scratch the AppleQmasterNode.mpkg from the Final Cut Server installation disk, and then use Software Update to get it back to 3.0.4. All this without disturbing a running Final Cut Server. (Obviously, qmaster processes will fail during the reinstall, but if you're at this juncture, your qmaster is probably not working anyway.)

Apple has posted a tutorial for configuring MultiSAN (with pictures!).

The tutorial has even solved one of confounding questions of our time, "What is MultiSAN?" To quote from the article:

What is MultiSAN? MultiSAN is a configuration in which any given MDC may host Xsan volumes that are not necessarily hosted by other MDCs.

So Volume 1 is hosted by MDC-A and MDC-B, and Volume 2 is hosted by MDC-C and MDC-D.

For the record, I'll quibble with one detail in the article:

Fibre channel switch: All MDCs, Xsan clients and storage devices should be configured to communicate in the same hard zone or orphan zone or should not reside in zone.

I think that Bulletproof Zoning, will still work, where all the storage is in a single alias. The important detail to note is that you can't zone out some of the storage from some of the clients with MultiSAN, — every client and MDC must see all the storage. But the clients shouldn't need to see each other.

Final Cut Server is a fine asset management system. Its real promise, though, lurks within its system for watching for arbitrary events and triggering actions. At WWDC this June, Apple wowed a few hundred people with a demonstration of this capability. Apple has now released the code and documentation of this demo.

Download the documentation and code in the "Web-Based Review & Approval" section of the Final Cut Server Resources page.

Here's the demo, in short. Using the FCS Client, click an asset's "Send to Web for Review" checkbox. This triggers FCS to compress and export a version of the movie, then add a record to an external database. A Ruby-on-Rails app reads the database and displays the movie in a web page for approval. Once approved, the Rails app sends XML to a drop folder, which is read by FCS, recording approval and completing the round trip.

It is a bit of work to get it working, but the demo touches all facets of FCS. It's a great eduction.

I've now had a enough opportunities to work with Qlogic 9000 series switches and Xsan to know that there are major snags with these switches that the integrator community should be aware of.

For those of us who have worked with Qlogic's 5000 series of stackable switches, we have taken for granted two features on these switches that are turned on by default.

First, 5000 series switches are set to Soft Zoning by default. This allows a large number of ports or WWNs to be grouped together without any issue. In large stacks of 5 switches, this means that putting all 96 ports into one zone isn't a problem. Soft Zoning is defined as a "virtual zone," which encourages entities to see just themselves, but does not limit them from contacting other entities if they know of their whereabouts in the fabric. Think of it as a zone made out of waist-high stanchions: the entities are focused on each other, but if they were aware of other entities before the stanchions were placed around them, they can still contact those other entities. That is why, after rezoning on 5000 series switches, we always need to reboot the storage and computers so that they "forget" about the entities that they knew about before the establishment of the zone.

Second, 5000 series switches have a default zone. The default zone simply states that if no zones exist, then all ports see each other in one large zone. Soft zoning and default zones go hand in hand because, again, soft zones allow a large number of entities.

9000 series switches have neither of these features on by default. Read the rest of this article to fix this.