Disney Matters to Apple

At CES, Disney announced that they are developing a DRM technology called “KeyChest” that will allow customers to purchase a piece of digital content and unlock the ability to access that content in multiple ways. The goal is truly “anywhere, anytime” access to digital content that could be on a computer, mobile device, the web and even third-party services.  One of the possibilities touched upon by Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee is that a purchase of a Disney DVD would unlock immediate access to stream that content to a computer or mobile phone.

Steve Jobs has made a personal fortune through Disney/Pixar entertainment. iTunes currently sells digital downloads of Disney movies and even provides the free Disney File downloads through codes that come bundled with a physical DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Is there any scenario in which Steve Jobs, as a Disney board member and the largest private stockholder, is not briefed on Disney’s plans to use this new technology to control the distribution of their media? Is there any scenario in which Steve leaves that briefing and does not decide that iTunes needs to be involved in these KeyChest transactions, including full support for streaming protected content purchased online?

Lala was not Acquired for the Lala Service

Lala was all about engineering talent and expertise. The Lala acquisition makes perfect sense if Apple wanted to bring in a team of engineers with a lot of experience in streaming content. I think that Apple is less concerned with Lala’s existing business model of syncing your own content to the cloud than it is with making sure that iTunes can still be involved in Disney’s plans to make both download and streaming protected, purchased content available online.

If this “Major New Product” (MNP for short) is a tablet, wouldn’t it be great if you could buy a movie on iTunes and immediately start streaming it to the MNP while iTunes is downloading it to your computer?

Quattro is not About iPhone Apps

When Apple purchased Quattro, there was a lot of talk about how this might impact iPhone developers who were looking to integrate ads into their products. Most arguments hinged on the idea that Apple wanted to grab a piece of the action in mobile advertising. I think Apple has bigger revenue opportunities and iPhone developers were doing just fine at putting ads into their products with some existing third-party services or even rolling their own. There’s something else going on here.

Looking at the rumors this week that Apple has been meeting with publishers like the New York Times to brief them on the “major new product” to be launched on Wednesday, what comes into focus for me is that these are the people that need help with an advertising management system. Apple is building a comprehensive platform for traditional print publishers to move online.

Newspapers and magazines were built on advertising revenue and this is a business model that print people understand. They want to hold on to their advertisers and keep that slice of the pie in the digital era. I believe Apple is courting papers like the New York Times with the message that they can offer a full service solution. AdKit (or maybe CoreAds?) will be an important piece of iPhone OS SDK 4.0 so that publishers can easily integrate advertisements into their digital content like ebooks and digital magazine editions.

Beyond the AdKit API’s, expect Apple to offer ad tracking and metrics directly into iTunes Connect so that publishers have a dashboard to track all the revenue from their products, both direct sales and display advertising within the product.

Is all this infrastructure in place after Apple acquired Quattro on January 5th? Absolutely not. But just like the Lala acquisition, Apple has bought a team that can get them a big leg up in this effort. Expect to see AdKit and the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK announced tomorrow with availability of the service to launch later in the year (think iPhone 3.0 SDK and the push notification service).

Both Acquisitions are About the “Major New Product”

Streaming media content and mobile advertising for content publishers are perfect for a tablet device. You have something to watch without requiring onboard storage of your whole library and ebooks and digital magazines have an easy way to transition content including interactive advertising. If all reports are on target, media and digital publishing are going to be big on this “MNP” to be announced.

Here’s another idea… why not show you an ad while you are waiting for Toy Story or Wall-E to stream to your MNP?

Here are the steps I took to make a backup and then rebuild my array. I decided to build the arrays a little differently, so these steps aren’t needed if you are just replacing a drive. “zpool replace storage c7d0″ with a new drive connected to controller 7 would have sufficed in my case.

To make a backup, I plugged in a 1TB USB drive and used fdisk to clear it into one big partition. I used the device driver manager in the Gnome GUI to tell me that it was sitting on c9t0d0. I created a ZFS filesystem named “backup” on it and then used “zpool send storage | zfs receive -f backup” to copy the filesystem to the other drive. This worked beautifully and only 12 hours or so later, I had a complete copy of all 900GB of data.

This points out the futility of backup for these large arrays. Even if you do have the drives, tape, or whatever, it’s hard to get more than 1 or 1.5GB per minute. That’s only 60GB to 90GB per hour. It takes a long time to backup a TB of data.

Once the backup was done, I used “zpool destroy -f storage” to break the array. I did this because I wanted to rebuild it as one 4 drive array with SATA drives and a single drive array with the other IDE drive in it. This way when I eventually upgrade to 1.5TB drives, I can just use four instead of the five drives that are in there now. With the drives ready to go, I created the new array and filesystem with the command “zpool create raidz storage c5d0 c6d0 c7d0 c8d0″. I also created a “movies” zpool for DVD rips that didn’t have to be redundant with the command “zpool create movies c4d0″.

Now that I had the two new arrays ready, I just used “cp” to copy the data back to the new arrays and put the folders in the right places (rips to /movies and everything important to /storage- the raidz array).

Actually I first saw the warnings a couple weeks ago when a scrub returned several errors in the zpool. The data was still good though because of checksumming in ZFS. I was getting a little anxious because I keep my iTunes library on the server along with raw footage from home movies. Important stuff to our family that I wouldn’t want to tell my wife that I had lost.

Most of the errors were on C7D0 (one of the four SATA drives in my setup) so I spent a week or two debating about whether I wanted to just upgrade the four 250GB drives to 1TB or 1.5TB drives. In the end, I decided on hoarding cash and I ordered a 250GB drive for $40. I’d still like to upgrade the array to 1.5TB drives when they hit $99 each, but I can wait to see if this new stimulus package will include free drives for homeowners along with the kickbacks to Wall St executives and help for stupid people who bought homes they can’t afford. I can only dream, right?

When the new drive arrived, I thought I would see if I could hot swap it. Smart, right? In hindsight it makes perfect sense that I would try testing out the resilency of ZFS and RAIDZ on a live array holding precious memories of my children’s births and early years when it was already starting to fail. Living life on the edge is what I like to do. Of course, when you try this on your own home file server, you might want to be a little more careful about tracing the SATA cables to make sure you actually pull the right one.

Panic. This was going to be a Friday the 13th for the ages.

There were a couple minutes there when I was literally sweating bullets. I was lucky though that the array wasn’t being used and so no data was lost. I brought c8d0 back up and cleared the zpool and all looked good.

Once I get everything up and running, I’ll write up the steps I used to make a backup, recreate the arrays, and copy my data back.

• downloaded OpenSolaris 2008.11 Live CD
• burned ISO file to a CD
• booted fileserver from Live CD
• double-clicked “Install OpenSolaris” on desktop of Live CD
• answered the install questions (time zone, username, etc.)
• ran “Add More Software” which launches the package manager
• installed the “nas-server” collection
• rebooted (apparently some of the nas-server config files don’t load properly until a reboot)

Then from the command line, I did some magic to get my existing 5-drive RAIDZ pool mounted on the new OS. My zpool has the unimaginative name of “storage” which you will see in the following commands.

• zpool import -f storage
• zpool upgrade storage
• zfs upgrade storage

Now that my zpool was mounted and ready for the cifs service, I had to enter a few more commands to get cifs running.

• svcadm enable -r smb/server
• smbadm join -w <workgroup name>
• zfs set sharesmb=on storage
• sharemgr show -vp (just to check)

And that was that. I just love how simple these commands are now. A lot simpler than SAMBA, but we’ll see if the new cifs service is as stable and fast.

I still had to do a little chown and chmod work to get permissions right, but then everything was perfect. The mapped network drive on my PC fired right up without any changes, and the saved “connect to server” favorite on my Mac worked immediately as well.

I have iTunes set up so that its “iTunes Music” folder is on the fileserver. So now all is well there and I can continue to manage my library from my Mac laptop, but store all the music files on the server. I feel a little better knowing that RAIDZ is protecting all those media files from bitrot, but I still need to get some backup in place for my 500+GB media folder.

Next project will be to see if I can get Firefly running to share out my movies folder to the AppleTV.

But then I thought, if I’m going to reinstall, why not try OpenSolaris? The new 2008.11 has some nifty features and all I really care about is getting my ZFS pool shared out via SMB/CIFS anyways. Hmmm, and doesn’t OpenSolaris have built-in CIFS support? That could be fun to try…

So 30 minutes later, I’ve got the OpenSolaris ISO downloaded and the CD has been burned. Booted into the CD, and I’m immediately greeted (well not, immediately – booting from CD is slow) by a desktop with Firefox, etc. all ready to go. This is nice.

There’s a “Install OpenSolaris” icon on the desktop. I click that and it recognizes my 6 drives. I wiped the boot drive and now it’s chugging away. It’s about 50% done after what seems like 15 minutes or so (I’m catching up on Twitter while I wait, so who knows how long it’s really been). Can’t wait to see it in action and get my zpool mounted and CIFS working.

Here’s what I’m really excited about… Apparently there are a few people that have Firefly Media Server running on OpenSolaris. This is going to be great!

Yep. It actually solves the Rubik’s Cube using the light sensor. Awesome.

This is awesome. Thanks, Wil.