Two years ago, only three months after the release of Xsan 1.0, a group of us from Tekserve launched Xsanity. Our intention was to create:

...a community for Xsan users, experts with individual relevant specialties. Here we can pool our knowledge and maybe make our jobs just a little easier.

Today we have over 500 registered users, some of the brightest minds around. This stellar group has contributed 80 feature articles and 1,359 forum posts. And we are noticed: last month, we served up over 100,000 pages.

And today we are making two announcements: a media gallery for Xsan setup diagrams, and five iPod Shuffles to give away!

The idea of the media gallery is cliche: pictures are worth a thousand words. There's nothing like a great OmniGraffle of your SAN to explain it to someone else. And while lots and lots of SANs will look basically alike, there are plenty of people with truly unique, creative setups.

And to kick off the gallery, we are giving away five engraved Tekserve/Xsanity NAB2007 iPod Shuffles to people who help get it started. There are two categories: Fastest and Best. One set of Shuffles for the first two diagrams uploaded, and another set for the best diagrams (most complete, easiest to understand, most creative).

The contest ends May 1, so start your graffles!

As an indicator of Xsan's increasing maturity, we've created a couple of new forum topics today.

• Resharing is for questions and experiences propagating an Xsan volume over more standard file sharing protocols, such as AFP, NFS, or SMB.
• Replication, Backups, and Archiving is to collect expertise on the daunting task of having typically massive amounts of Xsan data in more than one place. We'll also cover archiving.

We're always looking for ways to make the boards more useful, too. If you have a suggestion for a new forum, leave it in our Suggestions topic.

We are very pleased to announce a new forum for Building4Media's FORK products for broadcast video production, post-production and playout. The forum will be staffed by B4M's own tech support, including Jochem Vos and Nick Parker.

FORK is one of the growing list of products built on top of Xsan. For more information on B4M, please see their web site.

Apple's convenient list of RSS feeds is made somewhat less convenient since it lacks feeds for Xsan and OS X Server. We've decided to plug that hole, with a new sidebar called "Latest KB Articles." This section parses a recent KB search of Xsan-related articles into titles & dates. (We're skipping the OS X Server articles, since that is more AFP548.com's cup of tea.)

Since it's based on a simple page scrape, it's likely to break someday. But maybe by then we'll get a real feed.

The Xsanity crew spent a little time yesterday dealing with an unwelcome visitor on our server. He's gone, Geeklog's been patched, and we're all a bit wiser.

With help from Tekserve, we've printed 100 Xsanity T-shirts. We're happy to give these away to just about anybody, but we'll begin by shilling for articles. So send in an article about Xsan (about hardware, your config, a trick you've found, some benchmarks under 10.4.4--hint hint), and we'll send you a shirt.

To send that article, use the Contribute link under our logo.