Why would we do this We have several customers that use various cloud sync/storage options as another location for archived data. Once the projects are complete and we mark them read-only on the Xsan, they can be written to tape and sent to “the cloud” for further redundancy. This means we are almost constantly sending data up to these providers. In macOS Monterey (and...
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We have several clients using macOS to share data from their Xsans. There have been occasional instances where the smbd process spins up to over 100% and seems to get hung up. Connected users report slow file browsing or not able to navigate to new folders. New connections timeout before being prompted for authentication.We have found that killing the smbd process resolves the issue and...
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We are in the process of replacing Intel Mac minis with M1 Mac minis in our customers’ server rooms. For the MDCs we are using migration assistant and rebuilding the Open Directory master first, then migrating the BMDC and cleaning up the Xsan configuration and re-joining the Xsan. For other systems (file servers, sync servers, etc) one of main tools for data movement is rsync...
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We have been seeing spotlight processes (mds, mds_stores, mdworker_shared, etc) using a lot of CPU on some of our MDCs. By itself this isn’t a problem, but we have been dealing with some thermal issues in a couple of small server rooms. While the benefits of spotlight are nice, it isn’t worth the extra heat in this case. We tried disabling spotlight with mdutil, but...
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We have a lot of headless Mac Minis in server racks running Xsans and related services. So we use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) quite a bit to connect and work on them. For most of their history, a Mac Mini without a monitor was limited to low desktop resolutions (like 1280×1024 or even 1024×768), could lose any graphics acceleration from the Quartz Core Graphics framework,...
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We recently had a situation where an Xsan was misbehaving. Both MDCs were regularly freezing up and becoming unresponsive. We found that the systems were regularly creating core dumps and filling the /cores directory until the drive filled up. We tried to diagnose the cause of this, but were not able to figure it out from the core dump files. So we erased and reinstalled...
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I have been seeing some weird behavior with software updates on our macOS Monterey test Xsan. After running the software update, the Xsan volume does not mount. Trying to see the volume with xsanctl list results in xsanctl: unable to connect to xsand: No such file or directory. Having seeing this before I try to bootstrap the xsand launch daemon, which also fails. The error now is service is disabled. To resolve...
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We ran into an interesting problem on some of our Xsan connected systems. We created mobile accounts, but some of them wouldn’t show up at the Mac’s Login Window. These Macs are bound to an LDAP server and the user’s UniqueID (UID) comes from the LDAP server. The UIDs are assigned based on user type, so while employees are small numbers, contractors have ended up...
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In macOS Monterey the Server.app interface for setting up and managing Xsan is gone. Apple has produced an Xsan Management Guide (as of 2021-11-2 available on the Apple developer site). In this post I will walk through creating a new Xsan from scratch on macOS Monterey. Our test environment is made up of 2 Intel Mac Minis with ATTO Thunderlink fibre adapters connected to a...
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With macOS Monterey, Apple has announced that the Server.app interface for Xsan is going away. One small benefit to this is that we don’t need to wait for the official release of Server.app v5.12 to upgrade our Xsan to Monterey. Both Big Sur and Monterey have the same Xsan versions (Server Revision 7.0.1 Build 589[96634]). This post will show the steps I used to upgrade...
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