Adobe CS5 is now shipping. To download a demo check out https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=design_premium. Some new features include perspective drawing, width tool, shape builder, live view, browser lab, multiple page sizes, spanning, splitting and a new gap tool. Lots of new goodness here!
Whether you are installing it for 2 computers or 2,000, 318 can help with all aspects of your upgrade. Contact your account manager today, or sales@318.com for more information.
The iPad 3G (Wi-Fi + 3G) is now available for purchase at your favorite Apple Store or online from $629 to $829. They are great devices. With data plans from $14.99 to $29.99, you can take a wireless network with you anywhere that you go for less than the cost of one day worth of wireless access at many hotels.
There are a number of architectural changes that may need to occur in order to most effectively support these devices, so if you find that some changes need to occur in your environment, contact your 318 account manager for assistance.
The annual Apple WorldWide Developers Conference, WWDC, has been announced for June 7th through June 11th. The Developers Conference will again be held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco and this year will be solely focused on development, having no IT track. To see a list of sessions, click here.
As part of WWDC, Apple also hands out a number of design awards. If you have any applications you would like to nominate for a design award then you can do so here.
In Xsan 2, MultiSAN was introduced. MultiSAN allows you to assign different sets of primary, secondary and tertiary metadata controllers to volumes. This provides a performance benefit for some environments that have saturated resources on a given metadata controller. However, MultiSAN does not allow you to build separate SANs. All of the volumes are still members of that single “Xsan”, meaning that volumes can be mounted and/or controlled for any of the clients. You can have 2 volumes, each with a dedicated metadata controller, but both sharing a single backup metadata controller. You can also have 2 volumes, each with a dedicated metadata controller that fails over to the other metadata controller.
But if you do have 2 SANs, completely separate from one another, you cannot then have a client on both. Therefore, having multiple SANs isn’t exactly MultiSAN. MultiSAN means going from having a single metadata controller that controls your entire environment to having a slightly more object-oriented approach to metadata controllers. Which brings us to the question “do I need MultiSAN?” My answer is an if/then statement. If your metadata controller’s fsm or fsmpm processes are spiraling out of control then yes, you may (or you may have corruption in metadata somewhere. For coming up with the answer to my question I posted an Xsan monitor app awhile back on my apps page. But if your fsm/fsmpm processes barely tip above 1% and you’re still having bandwidth problems then look at stripe breadth/block size, fabric and defragmentation before considering buying a bunch of iron to move metadata controlling off onto dedicated hardware.
Now, if you do decide to integrate MultiSAN then to do so is a very straight forward process. First add the all of the metadata controllers as clients to the SAN. Then, create the volume. When creating a volume you will eventually come to a screen to define Volume Failover Priority. Here, you will see each of the clients that you have installed (in the beginning this might only be the metadata controllers). Check the box for each of the clients that you would like to be a metadata controller (I recommend no less than two but in most installations no more than 3 metadata controllers per volume). In this screen you can then also set priority by dragging each controller higher or lower in the list of controllers. If you only have two metadata controllers then the primary would be at the top of the list followed by the backup metadata controller. When you are satisfied with your configuration click on the Continue button and complete the volume configuration as you normally would. You can also invoke the Volume Priority screen from within Xsan Admin for pre-existing volumes.
This article was initially posted at http://krypted.com/mac-os-x-server/defining-multisan/
Thanks to Google for referencing our post introducing sandbox in their sandboxing design document for Chromium at:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox/osx-sandboxing-design
Their use of sandbox is really over and above what we’ve seen from any other vendor. Each installation contains 3 distinct sandbox profiles (currently I have 4.0.249.49 and version 5.0.342.9 although mileage here may vary according to updates), each profile allowing access to only files and resources that are absolutely necessary to complete the task that the process that leverages them requires. You can see the specific resources that are accessible by looking at these profiles. The profiles are located at:
cat /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Versions/4.0.249.49/Google\ Chrome\ Framework.framework/Resources/renderer.sb
You can then edit the profiles easily. For example, if you want to enable debug logging for sandbox, etc. This allows you transparency into what Chrome is doing but also allows you to further tighten security. Although, they have really taken their time to secure Chrome well and locked things down, so we doubt much further restriction is necessary or really possible. Overall, Chrome provides a great example of taking sandbox to the next level and extending it much more into the applications with graphical user interfaces than we’ve seen it extended to thus far.
Please be aware that there is a bad McAfee Antivirus update that will wrongly quarantine the SVCHOST files on Windows XP. McAfee is aware of the issue and has pulled the bad update file. Below is a fix in case you run into a case where the machine has already applied the update:
Note: For more information about the information contained in this article, contact us for a professional consultation.
As the iPad eeks its way into businesses we’re starting to hear a very common question: How do I access my files on the server? While you can enable WebDAV on most modern file servers and access data that way, or look to the cloud, many simply want a way to tap into existing SMB file shares. Well, you’re in luck!
Stratopherix (http://www.stratospherix.com) has released FileBrowser, an application for the iPad that can mount a file share and provide access to the resources on the share. FileBrowser will allow you to connect to servers and then access files as you would from a regular desktop computer, wirelessly or over a network connection.
If you find that you cannot access file shares once installed, then we have seen some policy issues on file servers (mostly those that do double-duty as a domain controller) or if you are remotely then you might need to either forward ports to the server or first establish a VPN into the environment. If you still cannot access them then contact your 318 account manager and we will be happy to assist with any needs you might have.
Happy File Browsing!
The iPad is finally here! 
While many will be standing in lines for hours at Apple stores around the country, you can also contact 318 and we will work with you to get an order processed without having the long wait. 318 has also been working with many customers preparing to deploy the iPad, and so if you have Exchange integration or mass deployment questions please feel free to contact your account manager today, or for new customers, the office at 310-581-9500.