Apple (finally) announces Final Cut Pro X !

Looks like a great great version.

Promise announces Thunderbolt-to-FC link

At NAB yesterday, Promise Technology announced the SANLink Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel adapter. From the press release:

“SANLink will provide a dual 4G Fibre Channel link that can be used to connect to external Fibre Channel storage or to an Xsan network. Each adapter features full duplex FC ports that automatically detect connection speed and can operate independently at 1, 2 or 4Gb/s. SANLink is the perfect companion to connect to the new VTrak x30 Series as well as maintain compatibility with the previous generation VTrak x10 Series.”

Bringing Xsan to laptops is great, but what about having Mac Mini Servers to interface to Xsan Volumes?

Cross-posted to Xsanity

Xsan Troubleshooting Tips #1 : Duplicate entry in /Volumes

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:~ fti$ cd /Volumes/
Bosco:Volumes fti$ ls
Macintosh HD SANVolume 1
Bosco:Volumes fti$ rmdir SANVolume\ 1/
Bosco:Volumes fti$ sudo xsanctl mount SANVolume
Bosco:Volumes fti$


References

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474?viewlocale=en_US

XXX is referring to non existing controller UUID

Error

Jan 24 16:36:33 mdc1 Xsan Admin[201]: ERROR: Failover priority {\n controllerUUID = "8FBFBF76-2DC4-4918-95A0-2576B3994F64";\n enabled = 0;\n} is referring to non existing controller UUID 8FBFBF76-2DC4-4918-95A0-2576B3994F64

Background

As you may already know, sometimes things go wrong in the GUI, and the only option you have is to force quit Xsan Admin.app. While thing seem to be solved, it always leave configuration errors.
Here I removed MDC1 from Xsan to isolate an issue, promoting MACPRO6 to backup MDC for a week. But when reverting back to the original setup a week later, the MACPRO6 wasn’t happy about that. What happened is that it did revert back to client, but MDC2 didn’t write that in the conf… While this doesn’t generate any GUI error and everything seems to works normally, a lot of error are printed in cvlog.

What to do…

Locate /Library/Filesystems/Xsan/config/[VOLUME]-auxdata.plist

And remove the offending controllerUUID parameter.

<key>FailoverPriorities</key>
[snip]
<dict>
<key>controllerUUID</key>
<string>8FBFBF76-2DC4-4918-95A0-2576B3994F64</string>    
<key>enabled</key>
<false/>
</dict>

Then restart volume.

References

http://www.xsanity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=782

hwmond: Could not convert interface name

It’s funny how a generic error like this one is poorly referenced on google… “Could not convert interface name” returns no more than 8 results… None of them giving any hint on how to solve this issue. I guess Google’s not my friend anymore.

1. The log


19/01/10 19:40:08 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:08 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:14 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:14 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:20 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:20 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:26 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:26 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:32 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:32 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:38 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:38 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:44 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:44 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name
19/01/10 19:40:50 hwmond[917] could not convert interface name


2. Troubleshooting

The first result from google was giving some advice about checking wether the DNS is well configured or not. I always take extra care setting the DNS right, first for aesthetic reasons, then to avoid latency caused by the system trying to resolve the IP. But this time I forgot to setup LOM DNS. I created a PTR for 172.23.3.11 to node1.lom.xxxxxxxx.san, but it didn’t solve anything.

Second guess was to check what interface are used and might be monitored. After doing an ifconfig command, I realized that having an AJA card in the Xserve installed an unnecessary serial port in the Network pref pane. After cleaning to leave only public (eth0) and private (eth1) network, serialnumberd and fsmpm did reload (both related to Xsan), and my hwmond errors disappeared… Victory !!

3. Before

4. After


19/01/10 19:40:50 /usr/sbin/serialnumberd[268] Responding to network change notification.
19/01/10 19:40:50 /usr/sbin/serialnumberd[268] Responding to network change notification.
19/01/10 19:40:50 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: launching configuration reload thread
19/01/10 19:40:50 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: fsmpm configuration reload initiated (flags FFFFFFFF)
19/01/10 19:40:50 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: fsmpm configuration reload complete
19/01/10 19:40:50 DirectoryService[26] GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information (Server not found in Kerberos database)
19/01/10 19:40:50 DirectoryService[26] GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information (Server not found in Kerberos database)
19/01/10 19:40:50 DirectoryService[26] GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information (Server not found in Kerberos database)
19/01/10 19:40:52 /usr/sbin/serialnumberd[268] Responding to network change notification.
19/01/10 19:40:52 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: launching configuration reload thread
19/01/10 19:40:52 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: fsmpm configuration reload initiated (flags FFFFFFFF)
19/01/10 19:40:52 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: fsmpm configuration reload complete
19/01/10 19:40:52 fsmpm[227] PortMapper: fsmpm configuration reload complete
19/01/10 19:40:57 com.apple.KerberosAutoConfig[966] Kerberos configuration is up to date
19/01/10 19:40:57 com.apple.KerberosAutoConfig[966] Kerberos configuration is up to date
19/01/10 19:41:15 /usr/sbin/ocspd[968] starting

5. References


if (_SC_cfstring_to_cstring(interfaceName, ifm->ifm_name, sizeof(ifm->ifm_name), kCFStringEncodingASCII) == NULL) {
SCLog(TRUE, LOG_ERR, CFSTR("could not convert interface name"));
goto done;
}

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/configd/configd-289.2/SystemConfiguration.fproj/LinkConfiguration.c

Blackmagic Decklink FCS Display Errors

Color: 

• “Unable to initialize OpenGL. Make sure Video Desktop is disabled.”

FCP:

• “• Pour le bon fonctionnement de Final Cut Pro, il est recommandé que votre système soit doté de 64 Mo de mémoire VRAM ; hors, il n’en dispose que de 0 Mo.”
• “• Final Cut Pro recommends that your system have 64 MB of VRAM; this system has only 0 MB of VRAM.”
• Quartz Extreme errors

 

Basically those errors mean that FCS is trying to use the Decklink Video Desktop as a regular display.

Solution:  For best results, you shouldn’t use the Decklink as an extended desktop. Switch in Systeme Preferences / Decklink the “When not playing video, send :” preference to “Black” or “Last Played Frame” :

 

If you _really_ need the Decklink Extended desktop, make sure that :

• The primary display is connected to the first DVI output
• Video mirroring is deactivated in System Preferences / Monitors

 

SOURCES:

• http://blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=181
• http://blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=184

[NAS] Bench Thecus N4100+

I’ve received today the Thecus N4100+. I have put in it four Seagate Barracuda 7200 – 1TB. It took around 48 hours to complete the RAID 5 Initialization. Seems to do the trick.

 

• default WAN IP = higher ethernet port = 192.168.1.100
• default LAN IP = lower ethernet port = 192.168.2.254

Note : modules (Apache+PHP, NFS, Printer…) are available on website.

AJA Kona 3 -> Which PCI-E Slot ?

AJA Kona 3 uses PCI-E 4-lane. Here’s the recommended PCI-E slots:

• MacPro (pre-2008) -> Slot 3
• MacPro (early 2008) -> Slot 2 or 3 
• Xserve intel (pre-2008) -> Slot 1 (use KONA3X)
• Xserve intel (2008) -> Slot 2 (KONA3 only — no PCI-X)

 

SOURCES:

• http://www.aja.com/html/support_kona_rec_sys.htm
• http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/98/869264