If you support geographically disparate Xsans that you don't have remote access to then chances are that you've needed to have someone send you the logs for their Xsan. And if so, then chances are you've stepped them through going into the /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/Data folder and emailing or FTPing the contents to you. Well, no more of that. You can now leave an item on the Desktop or the Dock to automate the process using XsanDebugger, a quick, light and easy app to get the logs compressed onto your desktop.

Simply download the app from http://www.krypted.com/apps and then extract the contents onto the server, or email it to a user as needed. Then, when you need to step them through sending you the logs all they need to do is double-click on the app and provide an administrative username and password (after all only an admin can read the folder). The result will be a file with a name indicated by the user on the desktop. Check it out and if you have any additions or changes then please feel free to leave feedback and those will be addressed!

Let's start with a simple one. Sometimes an Xsan Volume won't mount after an unexpected shutdown.

Background
The Mac OS X operating system (as well as all other unices OS) mounts filesystems in a folder. That mean that every time we plug a USB thumb drive, external hard drive or Xsan volume, it creates a folder in /Volumes using the name of the volume. This folder will serve as a pointer to the actual content of the drive.
If a drive with the same name is already plugged-in (that is, a folder with this name already exists), Mac OS X creates a new folder, appending 1.

What happens
Sometimes, the created folder isn't removed because of an unexpected shutdown. This means that either the Volume doesn't mount (this is usually the case with Xsan), or file paths are different, causing file offline issues.

How to solve this

1. Go to /Volumes (in Finder, Go > Go to folder… or CMD-SHIFT-G)
2. Check the contents of the ghost folder (be careful as some processes might have written some data in it)
3. Delete it
4. Reboot, replug device or remount

I usually do it in command-line, to ensure that I'm deleting an empty folder :

Last login: Mon Jan 25 07:54:49 on ttys000
Bosco$ cd /Volumes/
Bosco$ ls
Macintosh HD  SANVolume 1
Bosco$ rmdir SANVolume 1/
Bosco$ sudo xsanctl mount SANVolume
Bosco$

References

• http://boscovideo.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/xsan-troubleshooting-tips-1-duplicate-entry-in-volumes/ (Original post)
• http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474

This is a bash script I wrote for automating notifications for things that Xsan doesn't notify you about by itself. 318 has quite a few Xsan deployments to keep an eye on, and this helps get a quick overview of volume status and latency for them, so we know which ones need a little extra attention.

Lithium and other similar applications can do some of what we're doing here, but this is a quick way to do it without licensing.

Here's what it does:

1. Grabs volume names by looking at the directories in /Library/Filesystems/Xsan/data
2. Runs cvfsck -nv on the volumes it finds, extracting the Volume Status (Clean or Dirty)
3. Looks through the volumes' current cvlog for hourly latency summaries from the current day, pulling out sysavg
4. f the volume is Dirty, or any of the syavg numbers are above a predefined level, sends a notification email

  Options:

   -h
   Prints a usage summary.

   -l [Latency Level]
   Sets your acceptable latency level. Default is 500. You'll probably want to set that higher, especially if you've got a Promise instead of an Xserve RAID.

   -a [email address]
   Specify the address you want to send notifications to. Default is "root@localhost". You'll probably want to change that too.

I created an installer package, that installs both the script and a launch daemon that runs daily at 11 PM. Or you can just grab the script, sans installer.

It is clear that Xsan's most common use is for editing video with Final Cut Pro. But plenty of our readers are certainly using Xsan for other applications, too. How about you?

I encourage you to post your responses in our forum.

Interconnectivity with Xsan is usually a pretty straight forward beast. Make sure you can communicate in an unfettered manner on a house network, on a metadata network and on a fibre channel network and you're pretty much good to go. One thing that seems to confuse a lot of people when they're first starting out is how to configure the two ethernets. We're going to go ahead and do two things at once, explain how to configure the interface and show how to automate said configuration from the command line so you can quickly deploy and then subsequently troubleshoot issues that you encounter from the perspective of the Ethernet networks.

Once upon a time there was Fibre Channel Utility. Then there was a System Preference pane. But the command line utility, fibreconfig, is the quickest, most verbose way of obtaining information and setting various parameters for your Apple branded cards.

To get started with fibreconfig, it’s easiest to start with just asking the fibreconfig binary to simply display all the information available on the fibre channel environment. This can be done by using the –l option as follows:

Read more for the rest...

Sometimes you just need a small SAN for testing... Times when you don’t have fiber channel and you don’t need to provide access to multiple clients, like maybe if you're writing an article for Xsanity on an airplane. Now this volume is not going to be supported (or supportable) by anyone and nor should it be (so don’t use it for real data), but you can use USB and FireWire drives for a small test Xsan…