While you can easily sync your home directory from the server to a client, syncing changed data back to the server can fail as OS X tells you, that you don’t have proper permissions to access some of your local files.

This happens due to the way OS X deals with the sync process. After investigating what’s going on there, I found out that the easiest way to fix this is to use a logout hook which changes permissions.

I use this logout hook:

#!/bin/bash
user=$1
if [[ "${user}" == "" ]]; then
echo "Usage: logout.sh USER"
exit 1
elif [[ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]]; then
echo "Must be run as root. Exiting."
exit 1
fi
chmod -R -N "/Users/${user}"
chmod -R 777 "/Users/${user}"
chown -R "${user}":staff "/Users/${user}"
logger "Repaired permissions of /Users/${user}."

To set up the client to execute this script during user logout, I use a schema extended Active Directory like described in the free sample chapter of my Mac client management book.

Hope this helps you in your environment, too.

To make this work, you need to extend your AD schema. We describe this process in our book, but you can also read it in our free sample chapter on the O’Reilly site.

Unluckily, OS X Lion clients do not support these computer lists by default.

Apple has just released an article on their knowledge base site in which they describe how to make 10.7 clients support AD computer lists.
The article can be found here.

The overall process is simple:

1. Bind your 10.7 client to the AD (nothing special here).
2. Type “dsconfigad -alldomains disable” in Terminal.
3. In Directory Utility’s Search Policy tab replace e.g. “/Active Directory/WORKSHOP/All Domains” with e.g. “/Active Directory/WORKSHOP/workshop.intern”. Save your settings.
4. Open Directory Utility -> Directory Editor and create a new computer list:
5. Open Workgroup Manager, connect to AD hitting command-D, add your Lion machines to the freshly created computer list and add some settings to this list:
6. Reboot the client (or simply log out and back in again) to see if your new settings get applied.

That’s it!
So finally an easy way to manage 10.7 clients using AD computer lists.

If you need help doing this in larger deployments, please get in touch with me.

It allows you to scan a folder or volume for any MXF files and virtualize them as QuickTime movies, so that Final Cut Pro X and other applications which can’t work on MXF files natively, can use them without transcoding.

This enables FCP X to support a wider range of professional environments again, much like FCP 7 did using MXF4mac.

Here you find the slides of the speech I gave there.

Hope you enjoy!

Here’s a little bash script which automatically creates the files and folders you need:

#! /bin/bash
# crfilesandfolders recursively creates a number of folders and files
# starting in the the current directory.
if ! [ $2 ]; then
echo "Usage: crfilesandfolders [path to entry point] [number of files to be generated on one level] [depth]"
exit 1
fi
entry_point="$1"
no_of_subs=$2
depth=$3
level=1
echo "Entry point: ${entry_point}"
echo "Number of files and folders per level: ${no_of_subs}"
echo "Directory depth: ${depth}"
echo "Current Level: ${level}"
echo
initialize() {
local current_dir="$1"
local level="$4"
echo "Entry point: ${current_dir}"
echo "Number of files and folders per level: ${no_of_subs}"
echo "Directory depth: ${depth}"
echo "Current Level: ${level}"
echo
while (( ${level} <= ${depth} )); do
if (( ${level} == ${depth} )); then
for ((i=1 ; i <= "${no_of_subs}" ; i++)); do
echo "Hello, world!" > "${current_dir}"/file_$i.txt
done
else
for ((i=1 ; i <= "${no_of_subs}" ; i++)); do
mkdir "${current_dir}"/folder_$i
echo "Hello, world!" > "${current_dir}"/file_$i.txt
echo "Current dir is ${current_dir}."
done
level="$(( ${level}+1 ))"
for folder in "${current_dir}"/folder_*; do
echo "Processing folder $folder."
initialize "${folder}" "${no_of_subs}" "${depth}" "${level}"
echo "Processed folder $folder."
done
fi
level="$(( ${level}+1 ))"
done
}
initialize "${entry_point}" "${no_of_subs}" "${depth}" "${level}"
You can download the script from here.

The script works as follows.
Open a Terminal and type:
crfilesandfolders /Volumes/Data/test/ 10 3
where

• “/Volumes/Data/test/” needs to be the absolute path to an existing folder in which you want to create your files and folders.
• “10″ is the number of files as well as the number of subfolders we are going to create in each folder.
• “3″ is the depth of folders you want to create. 3 means that we create three levels of folders.

You can freely choose the number of files and folders as well as the directory depth.
Choosing “10″ as the number and “6″ as depth e.g. creates more than 1.2 million files.

This is how the result looks in the Finder:

Right now I am working on a software which tracks all changes in the filesystem in real-time, and with this little script it’s easy to generate lots of files to simulate the behavior of a busy fileserver.

Hope this is helpful for you, too.

Since June 2011, when the new FCPX entered the market, a lot has happened, though.

Apple has delivered the awaited updates to FCPX which bring back most of the features people were missing in its original release. And of course FCPX is much faster than FCP7 and offers rich automatic metadata extraction, which makes it very interesting for small shops without dedicated archivists. So today I would say FCPX can be the right choice for many post production environments, especially if you consider the incredibly low price.

At about the same time when FCPX was released, OS X Lion Server became available. It includes Xsan metadata controller functionality, while OS X Lion includes Xsan client functionality. The Xsan software on both server and client is free, and as of today I would say that Xsan is the most powerful SAN filesystem available for Mac environments.
Even if you need to support Windows and Linux clients, I would say that Xsan is a better choice than any other SAN filesystem. Especially if it comes to permission management regarding POSIX and ACLs. And did I mention it’s free?

Many people are not happy with the fact, though, that Apple doesn’t provide rack mountable servers anymore, so on which machines do you install the Xsan metadata controller software?
Though some people might shake their heads now, I can say that two Mac mini servers using Thunderbolt/Fibre Channel adaptors make powerful Xsan MDCs. Just buy them with as much RAM as you can, mirror the system disk and use the internal Gigabit interface for Xsan metadata, and an additional USB-Ethernet adaptor for management purposes and directory access (like Active Directory or Open Directory).

I just built a system like this with a system integrator partner of mine. Fibre Channel switch, RAID system, two servers, metadata switch, wires, setup and portable 19 inch rack cost around 20.000 EUR net incl. basic setup. The Xsan volume happens to have 36TB of free space, of which you can safely use 29TB net.

With this setup you can get up to 600MB/s read and write performance on a client, with the lowest latency possible in a SAN environment. You can’t beat these data with any other system, meaning for this price you won’t get more performance, lower latency, more space or more robustness.

Still, one question remains: is Apple going to further develop OS X Server and Xsan or might these products be dropped soon?
Today Apple answered these questions by announcing that OS X Mountain Lion will be released this summer. According to various web sites, there will be a server version and both server and client are going to include Xsan, so the next major Apple OS is going to continue support for our filesystem.

So we can say that today Xsan is a very powerful filesystem for Apple-based video production environments at an unbeatable price point and with a safe future for at least two years before the next major OS release shows up. But even with a new major release after Mountain Lion we can expect FCPX and other related apps to still support Mountain Lion, so if you buy an Xsan environment today, you might be safe for at least four years.

And consider the worst case, that Apple sooner or later drops Xsan support. Then it would a) be totally easy to migrate Xsan to StorNext (see http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/replace-xsan-mdc-with-stornext-mdc), and b) you would not have lost any money, as the whole setup is very cheap and its components can be used for other tasks if you take them out of your Xsan environment.

But anyway – this would be the worst case, and today I would say that combining FCPX and Xsan makes an unbeatable production environment. It’s cheap, you get rich metadata for free without taking much time to enter data manually, and it’s open and flexible in terms of permission management and support for Windows and Linux if you need that, too.

In addition Tim Cook seems to care for enterprise business and professional markets, so this might help us here, too.

If you read my articles from time to time, you might know, that my main interest lies in Media Asset Management. How should a MAM system look like to support an environment like this?

In my opinion it should follow these basic ideas:

• Users should be able to work in the filesystem. If they create files, your MAM should know about this in real-time. If someone creates an FCPX project on the Xsan, your MAM should extract metadata from the project and link all related assets to the project. Again in real-time. If someone sets permissions in the filesystem, this should be reflected in the MAM.
• Pricing should be less than 2.000 EUR net for a single server and unlimited clients.
• The MAM client interface should be HTML5 based and available through any modern browser.
• FCPX should be able to act as a basic MAM client by presenting the same metadata as the web-based MAM client.
• Consider the MAM as an extended search function as well as an automation engine added to your normal filesystem workflow.

Of course there are thousands of features the MAM should have, but I consider it crucial, that bringing in a MAM doesn’t break your existing folder-based workflow.
That’s why I’d like to connect storage, FCPX and MAM in a way that the MAM adds to your workflow but doesn’t force you to totally rethink your existing workflow.

Of course there are existing MAMs which provide rich features, like Cantemo MediaBox, FlavourSys Strawberry and SquareBox CatDV, but I think there’s still room for a MAM system which takes an FCPX and folder based workflow as a starting point and adds value on top of that.

What do you think about this approach?
I’d appreciate your input on this.

There’s no option to that in the GUI, so here’s how you do that:

Open a Terminal on the server, log in as an admin and find the config file of the site you are using for munki.
Custom sites sit in /etc/apache2/sites, and in my lab its content looks like this:

bash-3.2# ls -al
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 13 root wheel 442 16 Feb 12:17 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 root wheel 1156 16 Feb 12:17 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3685 16 Feb 12:17 0000_any_443_.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3685 16 Feb 12:16 0000_any_443_.conf.prev
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 917 16 Feb 12:17 0000_any_443_munki.andre-aulich.de_shadow.conf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 658 15 Feb 16:12 0000_any_80_.conf.default
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 658 1 Nov 18:26 0000_any_80_.conf.prev
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 504 16 Feb 12:17 0000_any_80__shadow.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 708 16 Feb 12:17 0000_any_80_munki.andre-aulich.de.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 708 16 Feb 12:16 0000_any_80_munki.andre-aulich.de.conf.prev
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 325 16 Feb 12:17 virtual_host_global.conf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 501 1 Nov 18:26 virtual_host_global.conf.default
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 325 16 Feb 12:16 virtual_host_global.conf.prev


So open the config file of your site in a text editor like vi and find this part:

Now replace “-Indexes” with “Indexes”, save the file and restart your web service.

You will now be able to list the contents of that site using your browser.

1. Open the FCSvr Admin panel and create a new device, on which we will copy the exported XML files (click to enlarge):
2. Create a “Write XML” Response which uses the asset title as the filename for our XML file. If you use subfolders in your media library, it’s possible that you have duplicate file names. In this case, please get in touch with me to discuss your options. The response looks like this:
3. Now create a “Search Expired” response, which finds all assets managed by FCSvr. Please note, that the resulting list gets stored in the Event Type variable “Custom 1″:
4. Set up a subscription, which gets triggered as soon as the Event Type variable “Custom 1″ gets fed by our Search Expired response. This subscription invokes the XML export:
5. Now tell FCSvr to invoke the “Search Expired” response: Enter any time which seems appropriate for you.

Now wait until your new workflow gets triggered.

If all works well, you should find a list of XML files in your XML folder:

Open a file to see a valid FCSvr XML structure:

If you want to import these data into another DAM, please get in touch with me to discuss how to transform these XMLs into valid import data.

Despite its shortcomings like missing rough cut editor, no native tape support for archives, lack of decent UTF-8 level 3 support when importing and exporting XML files, even today, almost two years after its last update and more than six months after Apple has dropped it, Final Cut Server seems to be the best asset management and workflow automation system for FCP7 clients.

Yet, though Apple still sells Final Cut Studio (FCS), sooner or later it won’t run on the latest Apple hardware anymore, so we need to consider switching over to FCPX, Adobe Premiere, or probably Avid Media Composer as soon as Apple drops FCS support with their latest hardware.

Final Cut Server doesn’t support project files of these editors (apart from Premiere using FCP7 XML structures), so a big part of its functionality can’t be used with the latest editors. In addition, Apple won’t fix any FCSvr bugs anymore, so you can’t really add functionality to your FCSvr based workflows.

Long story short, you might want to consider replacing FCSvr with a modern Asset Management and Workflow Automation solution sooner or later.

There are a couple of tools you might wanna look at, e.g. Cantemo Portal DAM, CatDV, ConSol* FocalPoint, Flavoursys Strawberry.

Strawberry and FocalPoint focus on sharing project files, both FCP7 and Media Composer, but –at the time of this writing– don’t allow to preview individual media files. Both tools are absolutely great in what they do, especially because they are so easy to learn and to use.

CatDV and Cantemo try to cover more functionality, and in addition to sharing project files you can share and preview individual media files.

There are other MAMs as well, which might fit your needs, and it’s up to you to choose the best fit as successor of your existing FCSvr environment.
(Or ask me to help you finding the right MAM).

In most environments, you might want to migrate your existing FCSvr installation to your new system.
This might include at least these things:

• Link new MAM to your media files
• Copy metadata of all your media files into the new MAM

Optionally you might want to preserve information which assets belong to which FCP projects and FCSvr productions as well as reuse existing proxy files.

Squarebox provides a migration tool, which helps you migrate all these data from Final Cut Server to CatDV.

Most other vendors don’t provide a migration tool, so you need to extract data from FCSvr on your own and prepare them for an import to your new solution.

If for instance you’d like to migrate from FCSvr to Cantemo Portal DAM, one way to do this looks like this:

1. Extract data from FCSvr. I use a script I wrote, which relies on fcsvr_client and exports an individual XML file per Asset. This XML file includes any metadata related to an asset. As an alternative you could set up an automation within FCSvr. (E.g. using “schedule”, which triggers a “Search Expired” response to find all assets and then triggers a “Write XML” response for each asset. This would give you the same result without using external scripts. See http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/export-asset-metadata-from-final-cut-server-using-builtin-tools-only for more details.)
2. -optional- If you need information which asset belongs to which FCP project and FCSvr production, I use a second script which gets this information from FCSvr, too.
3. I use another script which transforms the FCSvr generated XML files into XML files Cantemo Portal DAM understands. (Or to be correct: Portal DAM relies on Vidispine as its backend, and the XML files will be interpreted by Vidispine).
4. I rename each XML file (automated, of course), to match the name of the related media file, and place it in the same folder like the original media. This means that a file called mediafile1.mov will have an accompanying XML file called mediafile1.xml in the same folder.
5. Now I point Portal DAM to the FCSvr media storage and tell it to automatically add all files found on that storage to its database. PortalDAM will automatically detect media related xml files and add the contained metadata to the assets.

Please note, that I don’t mention migrating existing proxy files, here. This is because Portal DAM works with an HTML5 interface, so we need our proxies to be in another format than on Final Cut Server (only if you need a preview, of course, but hey, that’s what proxy files are for).

If you need information where your proxy files reside, please get in touch with me, and I can calculate the paths to your proxy files for you, so that these proxies can either be linked to your new MAM or automatically moved to a place better suited for your new MAM.

While vi, emacs and nano are nice tools and are available on most Mac and UNIX/Linux machines, using them remotely means that all your personal editor settings might not be available on the remote machine, and if you share a common admin account to connect to the remote machine, you might not be allowed to copy your personal setting files over to the remote machine.

If you prefer your personal editing environment, you either need an editor application which supports opening an ssh connection to the target machine and then opening the file with the local editor settings (like BBEdit), or you need to mount the remote ssh system as a local filesystem and then use any local text editor you prefer (like vi, emacs, TextMate, etc.). The latter can be done using Fuse4X and sshfs. There are plenty of tutorials on the net how to set up Fuse4X and sshfs.

In BBEdit instead, just choose File -> Open from FTP/SFTP Server, then enter your ssh connection details:

Make sure you activate “SFTP”, as this tells BBEdit to use ssh instead of ftp.
Now you can browse the remote file system the same way you could using an ssh connection in Terminal:

Just browse to the file you are looking for and edit it the same way as it was a local file.