Troubleshooting Archive Ops

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This article covers the commonly faced issues in the archive module, and how best to resolve them.

  1. My colleague ingested a hi-res media, and I want to now use it for editing in my local machine. I triggered Restore to fetch the asset from S3, but it is not working. Why?
    • Check the status of the asset from the metadata properties. If the status says Pending Archive / Submitted Archive / Ongoing Archive, then the asset has not yet reached the S3. Wait for some time, and then retry when the status becomes Copied-To Archive.
    • To know how long it might take for the copy job to be done, your colleague can check the hub dashboard; the dashboard shows the real-time progress in the data transfer.
  2. I ingested a hi-res asset. But its status is stuck in Pending Archive. What is wrong?
    • Check if your client-hub is running. If it is not, then you can start it from Z-menu->Hub (Stopped) -> Start.
    • If you do not see this option in your Z-menu, then add the following line in the zoom.properties and save. After this, be sure to restart the ClientProxy from the Z-menu.
      • SHOW_HUB_MENU_ITEM_ON_Z=true
    • If the asset is still stuck in the same Pending Archive statatus, then check if you have this flag in the zoom.properties set to true. If it is false, set it to true, and then restart the ClientProxy service.
      • ENABLE_C3=true
    • If after all the above steps, you find that the asset is not copied to S3, check with your Admin as to whether client-hub operations are allowed for your user account.
  3. I ingested a hi-res asset, and I can see that the metadata status inside Zoom is stuck at Ongoing Archive. Based on past ingest operations, I feel this operation should have completed by now. How can I check what is going on?
    • Go to your hub dashboard (Z-menu -> Hub (Running) -> Dashboard). Look for the asset ID in the table, and see what status it shows. If the hub says that the File Copy Completed, then the data transfer part has been completed successfully and the asset is on S3. It is possible that the status update to indicate successful copy (Copied-To Archive) has failed. This could be either because the Zoom server itself is down, or due to some network disruptions between your client machine and the server. If that is the case, then it will resolve itself whenever the server is accessible again.
  4. I see that one of the assets I ingested, is marked with status Manual in the hub dashboard. What does this mean? What should I do?
    • This generally means that the job could not be executed, because the file was not accessible.
      • Check if your TPM path (THIRD_PARTY_MOUNT_POINT) is correctly configured in the zoom.properties. If this is incorrect, none of the jobs would go through successfully.
      • If the TPM path configured in the zoom.properties is correct, and you have seen ingest operations work successfully in the past, then the problem may be because the TPM path is no longer accessible.
        • If it is an externally mounted drive, check that it is mounted correctly; unmount and remount if required.
        • Sometimes, for external drives, the drive letters may change on unmount / remount, or system restart. Check if the drive letter for the TPM mount is the same as the value configured in the zoom.properties. Update the value if required, and restart the ClientProxy service from Z-menu.
  5. I am trying to Restore an asset. It is failing, and the hub dashboard says that the file is locked. What to do now?
    • Restart the hub (Z-menu -> Hub (Running) -> Stop / Start).
  6. I am the Zoom Administrator in my company. I have a user who is not able to copy hi-res assets to S3 when she ingests into Zoom. She has the appropriate flags enabled in her zoom.properties. What is going wrong?
    • Check if her user account has been marked as a hub user. Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub User Panel. Select the user who is facing the problem. If the Hub User column says false, then you need to go to Hub User Operations menu at the top, and click on Mark as Hub User.
  7. I am the Zoom Administrator in my company. I have a user who has recently upgraded to a new workstation. I want her to ingest and copy to S3 from the new workstation, but disallow any hub activity from her old workstation. How can I enforce this?
    • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub Account Panel. Identify the hub instance corresponding to her old workstation. The name of the hub will be a combination of the user name, and her old machine name itself. Select this row, and then click on Change Hub State, and Mark as Inactive.
  8. I am the Zoom Administrator in my company. I want to disallow a user from running data transfers to S3. I still want to keep the user for other Zoom operations. How can I enforce that?
    • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub User Panel. Select the user you want to disallow client-hub operations for. Click on the Hub User Operations menu at the top, and click on Remove from Hub User.
  9. I am the Zoom Administrator in my company. We have a disgruntled employee and we want to make sure that she doesn’t have access to any hub features from her machine. What can I do?
    • Block the user from hub operations from the Hub Settings -> Hub User Panel page.
    • Block the hub instance from the Hub Settings -> Hub Account Panel page.
  10. I am trying to ingest a hi-res asset and it keeps failing with an error message that there is already another file of the same name on the server. I have already deleted the old file of the same name, but still I am getting this error. What should I do?
    • It is not enough to simply delete a file to vacate the place for a new asset of the same name. In the case of hi-res / image-sequence files, the asset may have been copied to the tier-2 storage, S3. It may also be present in the TPM path of the users who are working with it. The best way in this case is to purge the asset. On purging an asset, all the data associated with it – whether it is hi-res original data, or low-res proxy data – all are removed from wherever one may find them. Once the data is successfully removed from the S3 and the Zoom database, you can retry the operation.
  11. I am trying to ingest a hi-res asset and it keeps failing with an error message that there is already another file of the same name on the server. I have already PURGED the old file of the same name, but still I am getting this error. What should I do?
    • Even after purging, if you still see the error, chances are that the purge operation is still in the process of removing data from S3 etc. This activity may be going on in the background, and depending on network speeds, and other job load, it may take a little while before the purge completes. Please retry after sometime.
      • Meanwhile, if you want to know whether the purge is complete or not, you could open the Web Management Console -> Hub Settings -> Hub Jobs Panel, select your hub, and check under the Pending Jobs, if the purge job for the particular asset ID is listed. If it is fully processed, the entry will move from Pending to Completed Jobs. Another place to check from would be the hub dashboard, where it would list the purge job along with its current status.
  12. I have a hi-res file in my TPM path. But I am not sure it has been downloaded from S3 correctly. I triggered Restore again but the file is still messed up. How can I resolve this?
    • If a hi-res file is already present in the TPM location, subsequent Restore requests simply skip the operation to prevent incurring wasteful costs by unnecessary downloads from S3. If you think the file is corrupted, and want a fresh copy, delete the file from the TPM path, and then trigger Restore.
  13. I am the Zoom Admin in my company. I see that the server-hub in our deployment is failing to start. I have tried restarting the service multiple times now. What to do?
    • Check the following settings. Make changes where required, and restart server hub to see if the problem gets resolved.
      • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub Configuration Panel. Select the server hub in question, and look up the location parameter. Ensure that it maps to a legitimate VideoLx location defined.
      • Open the hub.xml file present in the conf/ folder of the server hub deployment. Ensure that you have entered a valid Zoom username and password in the appropriate sections.
      • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub User Panel. Ensure that the server hub user is marked as a hub user.
      • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub Account Panel. Ensure that the server hub is marked as active.
  14. I am trying to ingest hi-res assets from WebClient. But the ingest is failing with an error that no hub is configured.
    • You (or your Zoom Admin), must configure a server hub to handle the ingests from the WebClient app.
      • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Action to Location. Ensure that the s3-upload action is pointing to a correct location here.
      • Go to Web Management Console -> System -> Hub Settings -> Hub Configuration Panel. Ensure that there is a valid server-hub for the location defined in the above step.
  15. We have a central server-hub running in our deployment. We ingest hi-res assets and they get copied to the S3 successfully. But the files are immediately removed from the shared P-SAN and so we are not able to use them in our editing work. Why is that?
    • Check the hub.xml in the server-hub conf/ folder. Look for the tag alwaysDeleteFromPsan. If this is set to true, then the files get removed soon after copy to S3. Reset it to false, and restart the server-hub for this to take effect. That should resolve the issue.
    • An aside here: this flag should be set to true if your server-hub is running on the cloud, and disk storage is scarce there. Otherwise, there is a risk of running out of disk space on cloud.