LucidLink training

Good morning or evening or afternoon as the case may be wherever you are in the world. My name is John Prather. I'm the director of technical support for LucidLink, and I'd like to thank you for joining me today for LucidLink two zero one, workspaces and file spaces for administrators. This is our webinar that goes into essentially how to manage, LucidLink for your team, how to set it up, how to integrate it into your workflows, and how to do all the things an administrator needs to be able to do to successfully take advantage of all the value that LucidLink provides. So for today's agenda, this is kind of what we're gonna cover. Those times are probably not completely, accurate, but they're good guideline. We're gonna start out talking a little bit about how LucidLink works. I find it very useful for troubleshooting and, you know, understanding what to expect as far as behavior for our unique cloud storage. So we'll kinda go into that, and then we'll start talking about the LucidLink clients, what various clients we have, how they work, and and, you know, what you need to know about them to, manage your users using, the LucidLink clients to access the cloud storage. Then we'll get into creating and managing workspaces and file spaces. What are they? How do they work? And then we'll talk a little bit about users, how to invite members to to join your workspace, how to give them access to particular folders, within various file spaces that you're managing. And then we'll get into kind of an introduction to the command line interface. The command line interface is very important for an administrator to use. It's very useful, when building out your workflows and particularly if you're gonna be running it on a server or Linux system where, You can do everything you can do in the app. At the command line, you can actually do a lot more at the command line, and there are some things you can only do at the command line. So I'm gonna give you an introduction on how to access the command line, how to learn how to use it, and some of the basics that are there, including, performance, measurement and tracking and kinda understanding how to tweak your performance. Spend a short amount of time on troubleshooting and incident reporting, but I think understanding how LucidLink works will really help you understand how to troubleshoot any potential problems you might have. And then, hopefully, we'll have some time at the end for a q and a. So let's get on into it. Before I get into how LucidLink works, though, I wanna cover this. This webinar is about the new LucidLink three. I actually need to change this because it's actually three point one now. We won't be covering LucidLink Classic here, but I do wanna kinda touch on LucidLink Classic because it's still you know, the majority of our enterprise customers are on it. And probably over the next year, they will be, upgrading that to three point o. But there are some differences between the two. So, on our website, there is this page, LucidLink classic versus the new LucidLink. You can get to a bunch of places, but probably the easiest way is to go to this product overview. the first thing you'll notice is LucidLink Classic has a white background. The new LucidLink has a black background. So it's pretty easy to identify them. The functionality, you know, some of the basics are very much the same, but there's a lot more extension and capabilities and features in the new LucidLink. And, everybody's gonna be moving to that eventually, because eventually we'll deprecate LucidLink Classic, which is currently at two dot nine. So that's how they look different. The user model is the main thing that's different though, and it's very much a core function. With the old LucidLink, you could have a domain, and you could have multiple file spaces within that domain. But the filespaces themselves were kind of unique and independent. If you created a user for one file space, that user might not exist in the other file space. There's no tie between them. In fact, you'd manage your file spaces in a web portal, which was a completely different login than a login to the file space. And if you had multiple file spaces you were managing for your users, you would have to recreate users for each one. We're actually have an SSO integration for each one, and it it was just very difficult to manage. And on top of that, we had no way to reach users if there was some, something we wanted to, notify them of, you know, an outage or or something else going on. So the new user model is, each user is a unique user. They have an email address to log in, And any file spaces or workspaces that they're given access to, they will when they log in to the application, they will be able to access any of the file spaces or workspaces that they've been given permission to. They don't need to log in to each file space independently. So it makes it a lot easier on the users as well as on administrators to administrate multiple file spaces. And, so that's one of the core differences when you log into the clients. You don't have to log in for each file space. Once you're logged in, you get access to everything that you've been given access to. So that's kind of the core difference is that user model. The other thing I wanted to mention was upgrade paths. You know, obviously, if you have a classic file space and you want to jump into three point o or three three dot x world right away, you can create a new, account, a create a trial even, create a workspace and a file space in it, and then just migrate your data. You know, mount both of them, copy the data from the classic file space to the to the, new LucidLink file space. Obviously, if you have a lot of data to move, that can take some time. But the two applications, the two versions will, you know, peacefully coexist. You can have both clients running. You can have both clients mounting file spaces at the time same time. So it's easy to migrate data between them. And we will have an in place upgrade. It's probably expected in the middle of the year, thinking June, July time frame. And that upgrade tool will basically allow you at your leisure to upgrade a file space, and you'll be able to upgrade each file space independently. Yeah. There will be a short downtime as far as your users, and you can control when that, maintenance window would occur. But it'll be an in place upgrade. The clients, you know, three point x client will not be able to access two dot x file spaces. A two dot x client won't be able to access the three dot x, file space. So, you know, as part of your upgrading the file space, you're also gonna have to upgrade your clients. But that in place upgrade tool should be available in the middle of the year. So that's kinda all I'm gonna talk about classic on this webinar, but, definitely, if you have any problems, questions, issues, ask your customer success manager, your sales team, or you can reach out to support. So let's go back to the slides. I like to talk about how LucidLink works, so that you can understand what to expect. Certain things don't necessarily make sense unless you know how we work, and it also helps explain some of the features. So I'm not gonna get too technical about how LucidLink works, you know, underneath the hood as it says here. But I do want you to understand how it works so that you can more easily troubleshoot and understand how to get value out of our unique cloud storage system. So the first thing in learning how it works is kinda to compare us to traditional sync and share, cloud storage systems. Sync and share has been around a long time. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, they all work very similarly. And the way the sync and share works is if you and I want to collaborate, we want to work on some project together, you know, like, say, a very large file. Well, let's say I want we wanna work together on a ten gigabyte file. Well, if I want you to look at the work I've been doing, I need to take that ten gigabyte file, put it into the cloud storage, let's call it Dropbox, and it syncs up to the cloud. And once it's fully up in the cloud, then you can see it and you can download it. So you download the ten gigabytes to your computer, you open it, and you can see what's in that file. You can make changes yourself. And when you're done with making the changes that you wanna make, you save that file, and it gets uploaded or synced to the cloud. And that appears as an update for me, and I can download that file you modified and open it up and see the changes you made. But as you can imagine, just describing it is cumbersome, and this upload download or syncing, really slows your workflows inherently. You know? Constantly uploading and syncing files, it just is not a smooth and and efficient workflow. Additionally, it uses a ton of storage. You know, if that ten gigabyte file that you and I are working on is just an example, well, I have a ten gigabyte file on my computer. There's a ten gigabyte file in the cloud storage, and there's a ten gig gigabyte file on your computer. So we're using a ton of storage for this ten gigabyte file three times it. What what do you imagine if you had ten users or twenty users working on the same project? You're using a ton of storage for this file, and it introduces a huge problem, that I mentioned here as potential conflicts. But which file is the real file? You know, if you made a change to the file and it hasn't synced to the cloud yet, and I'm looking at the file from the cloud storage, I'm not looking at the current version. You've modified it, but it just hasn't synced yet, and I haven't downloaded it yet. So, you know, that's a huge problem. And if you write to the file and I write to the file at the same time, then the cloud has to kinda manage the, potential conflict of our two different updates to the file. So it's a real problem in sync and share, platforms. What LucentLink does is we are a streaming block storage. So what is a block storage? Well, when you put a file into LucentLink Filespace, we take that file and chop it up into pieces that we call blocks. By default, each block is one megabyte, and it's compressed and encrypted and uploaded to the cloud storage as fast as it can. But that same scenario where you and I are working on a ten gigabyte file, when I put that ten gigabyte file in the file space and it chops it up and updates it to to the cloud, from the moment that first one megabyte block reaches the cloud, you will see the file, and you can start downloading. You don't need to wait for the whole ten gigabytes to upload. So already, we cut in half the time to collaborate because you can do all your downloading while I'm finishing my uploading. But the real magic happens when the whole file has reached the cloud. You're gonna hear me say this multiple times, but the cloud is the single source of truth. So when I upload that file, when you download it and start working on it, if you make a change to a file, the whole file doesn't change. Just the block that you modified changes. Your client creates a new one and uploads that new block to the cloud. And if I'm looking at the file, that block comes straight down to my client immediately. And I am seeing the current version of the file because the real version of the file is the cloud version, not what's on on the clients that are accessing the files. So, you know, the first thing is it's very efficient. We don't use three times the storage for this file, or however many users you have accessing the files. And you're very efficiently using the bandwidth. You don't need to upload the whole file if the whole file didn't change because it usually doesn't when you're, you know, editing a file. Additionally, there's a single source of truth. It's the cloud. You know, things can happen on clients. Clients crash, power goes out, software does things, and you get malware on your computer. Those can cause problems on a local client, and we can help you fix them. And I'm gonna give you some clues on how to troubleshoot them yourself. But things can happen on clients. But once the data is in the cloud, that's the sole source of truth, and we protect the security and integrity of those files in the cloud. So, you know, it's just a more efficient and effective cloud storage. Additionally, the way we work and I'm gonna get into our architecture here in a second. But the cloud storage does real time updates and collaboration to, everybody. So, you know, one of the values of that block storage is we can stream data and metadata data to you in real time. So let's say I have a very large file that you've created for me that is a video file, and it's a hundred gigabytes. And I go to open it, you know, in a traditional sync and share again, I would have to download a hundred gigabytes before I could open that file and start working with it. With LucidLink, I can open that file, and if it's a video file, I can just hit play. And we're streaming the pieces of the file to the client on demand. So the application gets the data it needs, and it can just basically play that video on screen. And if I jump to the middle of the file, we don't make you download all of the file up to the middle of the file. We just start streaming the blocks that are in the middle of the file. So I can jump around this file as if it's local without waiting for the whole file to download. Makes workflows a lot smoother, a lot faster. And as it says here, you're faster to your first data. So let's get into our architecture. LucidLink is a log structured cloud based block storage that is split pane, meaning we have a metadata side of the activity and a data side of the activity. And this architecture diagram kinda shows you how that works. Now the three main components. LucidLink client does a lot of the heavy lifting. I show it here on the bottom. And the client does all of that, block creation, compression, encryption, as well as, you know, decompression and decryption when it's downloading those files and reassembling them into the files and delivering that to your applications. So that client is doing a lot of the heavy lifting of the activity. And what the activity in the background is is the data is those blocks are going up to that object storage in the cloud, and I'll talk about object storage here in a second. And the metadata or data about data is updated in the metadata service. So that's kind of how our client works. You'll see in this diagram, this bottom left corner, there's kind of a icon that shows some pink squares and some little folder icons. What the pink squares represent is those blocks of the data that you are uploading to the object storage. The little folders represent the metadata. So what is metadata? And we'll talk about the metadata service. Metadata is data about data. So file names, folder names. Folders don't even exist in object storage. But human beings are used to organizing their files into folder structures. So so we provide folders in the client that are really just metadata. When a file was created, when it was last modified, who has access to the file, all that stuff is metadata. And so our client is constantly talking to this metadata service, also called a Filespace service. Each Filespace has its own metadata service, which is really a virtual machine, spun up in the cloud near where your object storage is. And it's updating that metadata in real time so that all the clients that are connected to it, see the actual real time data, that's in your file space. We call the metadata service or file space service the hub because you can imagine a hub and spoke where the the hub is the metadata service and all those spokes go to the various clients that are accessing the data in the file space and getting those and making those updates in real time. So that's kinda how the metadata service side works. The object storage is just a traditional s three compatible object storage. You know, Amazon came out with s three object storage, I think, two thousand six. S three standing for simple storage system. And object storage is the perfect back end for cloud storage because, first off, it can he store huge amounts of data. Literally petabytes, zettabytes, you know, millions of files, billions of files. They're all stored in a bucket. That's the technical term they use. And it's very flat. Like I said, there's no folder structures in there, but there's a database that keeps track of where those objects are. When you take an object when you take a file from a local file system and put it into an object storage, it's called an object. And object storage was created to deal with storage at Internet scale. That's massive amounts of data, massive amounts of file access by many, many, many, many users, simultaneously. So that's why we use it as our back end. And, again, the sync and share products, all of the cloud storage products that you've used, most of them use s three object storage on the back end because it can scale and it can perform really well. It does have limitations in how it works natively, and, you know, that's a lot of what we address in the way we use object storage as the back end storage for our cloud storage. But, that's how that works. Both the data and metadata streaming to the client on demand. And I'm gonna talk about some of the things the metadata service does, but I also kinda wanna use an example so that you can understand how all this works. A couple things that the metadata service does, you know, first off, that metadata coordination, the the hub, keeping all clients up to date with the data that they're working with or at least the metadata that they're working with so that nobody is getting old data. But it also performs some other functions. It does global file locking for Windows, which means when I open a file in Windows, as long as it's in my locking list, that file will lock so nobody else opening it can write to it. Many applications cannot simultaneously write to the same file. In fact, doing so can cause corruption to the file, and we have global file locking to stop that. When I open that file, you try to open it to write to, it'll tell you it's a read only file, or do you wanna open it and read only because somebody else already has it open to write to. So that global file locking, that is handled by the metadata service. It handles that coordination of file logs. It also does snapshots, and I'm gonna describe what snapshots are. People think of snapshots mainly as a backup, but it is not a backup. A backup is a copy of your data to a secondary storage system so that if you lose data in your primary, you can always go to the backup. But a snapshot does not copy data. It doesn't increase data at all. What it does is it is a copy of your metadata at a moment in time where it will retain data that would have otherwise been deleted so that you can go back to that moment in time and recover your files as they were in that snapshot. So I'm gonna kinda describe how that works, but I wanna point out the one other thing that the metadata service does that is, you know, essential. It does something called garbage collection. Now the LucidLink clients, no matter where they are, they do not delete data. You know, you can delete a file in your file space, and it will disappear. No one will see it. But the actual data is not deleted by the client. That was actually deleting the metadata, so when people look in the folder, there's nothing there anymore because you deleted it. So let me explain how snapshots and garbage collection and the metadata coordination all work together. Let's say I create a one ten megabyte file, a text file, big text file, ten megabytes, many, many pages of text. Right? And I save it to the file space. Well, the client will break that up into ten one megabyte blocks, each get compressed and encrypted and uploaded to the object storage as fast as they can, while at the same time that metadata is being updated in real time. In fact, if you look at the, metadata, you know, look in Finder or Windows File Explorer at the file, you will see it growing as those blocks, those pieces of the file get up to the object storage. So it'll go one, two, three, four, all the way up to ten megabytes, and then the whole file's up in the cloud. So let's say we take a snapshot then. That snapshot is a snapshot of metadata. So that metadata knows that there were ten blocks associated with this file. The file name is whatever it is, and it's located in whatever folder. All that stuff is metadata. Anybody else looking at that folder will see the same file, the same metadata. And let's say you open that file. Well, those ten blocks, you know, your client gets the metadata for them and starts downloading those ten blocks and reassembling them, you know, decrypting, decompressing, and reassembling them into the file and delivering them to your text editor, say, and you open that file, you can see all the text, and you change one word, and you hit save. Well, the whole file didn't change, but one of those blocks did change. So your client creates a new block, because clients don't ever delete or modify existing blocks, and it uploads that one block up into the cloud. So if we're looking at the object storage, when I put the file in, we saw ten long UID, you don't even know what it means, objects appear in the object storage. If you open any of them, it's just a bunch of garbage because it's encrypted. Now, when you make the change and save the change to your file, that one block got uploaded to the object store, so now there's eleven blocks in the object storage. And I can see that the the file has changed because if I open it, my client goes to the metadata service, and the metadata service says, you have nine of the ten blocks in your cache. You actually have ten blocks in your cache, but one of those blocks is stale. It is no longer part of the live file in the cloud. So I need to get you the new block that your client created. So it downloads the one block, decompresses, decrypts, reassembles it, delivers it to my notepad, and I can see that you may you changed a word in this file. Now let's say I just close it without saving, and I decide, you know, I don't even really need this file. So I just hit delete. Well, anybody looking at that folder, the file will disappear because it's been deleted from the active file space, and that metadata has been updated. But if I mount snapshots, it's very interesting. If I mount snapshots, I will see the file as it originally existed when I first put those ten blocks in and we took the snapshot. Ten minutes after I delete the file, the garbage collection service says, hey. I have something I can delete. But it only deletes one object from the object storage because the rule is if the file doesn't if the data doesn't exist in the active file space and the data doesn't exist in any snapshots, then the garbage collection can collect it, can delete it. So it deletes the new object that your client created in the object storage because it doesn't exist in the file space anymore, doesn't exist in any snapshots. But we retain the ten original blocks of that file and the metadata because it's in a snapshot so that I can always recover that file from the active file space if I need to. So that's how garbage collection snapshots and the metadata coordination works in real time. I'm not gonna get any stale data even if that's all that's in my cache. I will get the new data. The metadata service knows what data is new and old and, you know, even what's being retained in snapshots. And that's basically how that works. So last thing I wanna point out on this slide deck is, something to think about when you're trying to understand what's going on or you are troubleshooting. When you are looking at your list of files in Finder or Windows File Explorer or or you even have a command line typing in dir or l s, you are listing metadata, not data. So you can stream the metadata. You know, as you navigate around the files file space, your folder structures will stream the metadata for the folder you're in and maybe a couple subfolders. We do that kind of anticipatory. It's kind of prefetching of metadata and the idea being that, well, when you go to the subfolder, you don't wanna wait for the metadata to download. So we stream it in advance and do some prefetching there. If we do the same thing with data, when you open a file, we stream the day data to your client. It comes down into your LucidLink client cache, and all that work is done on it. But, you know, if there's a problem on the object storage side, let's say, the object storage provider has lost an object, or let's say that a firewall is blocking the object storage. So you go to open the file that you see in finder, and your application says, hey. That file is no longer where you thought it was or the file is corrupted. Well, your application isn't really sure that the data the file is corrupted. All it knows is it requested the file from the storage, and it didn't get anything. Well, in this scenario, it's because it's blocked by the firewall and, you know, something you can fix. But I wanted to point that out is, you know, you can have different kinds of problems occur. So if you are seeing different things than your neighbor is in the same folder, it's probably a metadata update problem. Either your client is not updating metadata when you're making changes because it's having problems accessing the metadata service or their client isn't receiving updates from the metadata service. So if two users see different things, first thing to think of is there might be a problem with the connection to the to the metadata. If you go to open a file and you start getting errors with the data there, that's a data side problem. So just keep that in mind as you're troubleshooting and analyzing what's going on with your, users. So that's how LucidLink works behind the scene. It's you know, salespeople always talk about the magic of LucidLink, the fact that you could be accessing a petabyte with, you know, tens of millions of files, in the cloud as if it you plugged in a local USB drive. It is magical, but the way we're doing it is streaming the actual data and metadata to your client on demand. So it's not as magical, but hopefully, you'll still enjoy using LucidLink. Now let's talk about the clients in-depth. The clients are how you access the data in the cloud storage, and we're gonna spend some time talking about the desktop application to start with. The desktop application, really consists of two parts. One is the app. The app you know, I'll bring it up here. This is what the app looks like on Windows. Looks exactly the same on the Mac. I'm logged in as the same user, so it should look exactly the same here. The app is just a graphical user interface. Most of the activity, most of what's done in a file space is happening in the daemon, which is the back end process that does all that, you know, metadata activity, block creation, encryption, decryption, compression, decompression. All that stuff is really being done by the daemon. But what the app does, the app provides a graphical user interface to the daemon so that it can, mount multiple file spaces by running multiple daemons in the back end. You can change configurations of each one of those daemons in the app, and you can do lots of things within the app, but the app is just a graphical user interface. The daemons are what are doing the actual work. Now if you look at this, I have two file spaces mounted from this workspace here, and I will go through the UI for you here in a minute. I have one file space mounted in this workspace. If I just do a list like I already did here, I can see these are the three file spaces that are connected. Essentially, these are the three daemons that are running for each file space. Each file space has its own instance and their own, daemon running. This port is the port that that daemon is using to communicate with the app. So, again, the, daemon, you can run it by the app. If I connect to a file space in the app, I'm actually sending a command over that port to the daemon to run and connect to that file space. But I can also run the daemons by themselves. I can run them at the command line and connect to a file space at the command line. I can also run it as a service. I can run it as a Windows service on a Windows server. I can run it as a system d service on Mac OS or Linux. And running it as a service is more appropriate for a server because, you know, servers reboot, servers are, you know, generally, headless in terms of they don't have a monitor directly attached that somebody's sitting in front of like they do with their desktop. So you can run the daemons by themselves and run LucidLink as a service, and there's one daemon running for each file space. Both the daemons and the app look and act the exact same way in macOS, Windows, and Linux. So you once you learn the basics of LucidLink, it's applicable to every operating system. I will point out where the log files are, what a node ID is in cache, and Metastore, where those are. So on, you know, you could see these three file spaces, these instance IDs. So I wanna know where their logs are and where their cache is. What I do is I go to my c drive, go to users, and on a Mac OS, it's the same thing. It's just you go to the home directory for the user profile that you're in. So I'm logged in here, and you will see a dot lucid folder. Same thing on Mac. In there in the user's home directory, you will see a dot lucid folder. It's hidden on Mac, so you need to hit command shift period to unhide it. But then you will see these subfolders, and you notice they have instance IDs. These lower ones are actually for classic file spaces. These are for, the new LucidLink. So, like, if I wanna see this test dot j p tester let's look at sample media dot l l u. That is instance ID two thousand and seven. So I'm going to go inside that folder. And what I will see in that folder is a few things. I will see a Lucid log file. That is the log file for that daemon that is connecting to that file space. So if I need to see what's going on with, connecting to sample media dot llu, that's where I would see it in that Lucid log. The LucidJSON just has some configuration information related to this this file space. And then this folder right here, has a long folder name. So if I look here and do lucid ID two thousand seven and status, I can see some information about this file space, and I see a Filespace ID right here. It's kind of our backend ID for this particular Filespace. It's unique. Well, you'll notice the folder name in in this instance is that same as that ID. So, inside that folder this way. Inside that folder, you see a cache and a metadata DB, a metadata DB. The cache contains the data cache. Data cache is that local storage, a portion of your local storage that you dedicate to the use of LucidLink for that file space. By default, the data cache is set to twenty five gigabytes for each file space. You can make it larger or smaller, as small as a hundred megabytes and up to ten terabytes if you want. And we'll kind of touch on that. In one zero one, we explain a lot about why you might want a larger cache for your file space. But with the twenty five gigabyte cache, you could access petabytes of data and act as if it's local. So that's the data cache. The MetaDB is the metastore or the metadata cache. So both are cached. Once you access them, you don't need to download them again unless you don't have the data or the metadata that you're trying to access at that time. And we will stream it to the client, but we'll also cache it because data and metadata that's in your cache can be accessed faster. It doesn't rely on your Internet connection speed to access it. That's why we cache it locally. So if you, access it, you can access it instantly. The other thing is there's a node CFG file this node CFG is, each client has a unique node. When you first connect to the file space, the first user is gonna get node one. Second user will get node two. And as users connect, they're gonna get a unique node. And, each cache, Metastore, and node ID is unique to that client. You cannot copy them. You shouldn't be restoring them from backup. In fact, you shouldn't even be backing them up because if you do, we will identify that. It could cause a problem, especially if you're, like, restoring storing an older version of cache. So we'll identify it, and we will reset the cache. Basically, throw that whole folder out and start from scratch again. That way we can avoid causing, corruption and problems because of problems with the cache. So, the other thing I wanted to point out is if I go back to my dot lucid folder, there'll be an app dot log. That is log file for the LucidLink app, the GUI. So if you look at that log file, just keep in mind you will see stuff related to the communications to the daemons, but the daemon logs are separate. So the app logs are only gonna have things that you do within the app that are not related to a specific file space. So that's the app log, and the Lucid log is in the instance, folder. So we also have a web application. How do you get to the web application? Well, if you're in our website and you go to log in, you can log in to it here. So if I go john dot oops. And, And here I am logged into the web app. And notice this is a web page, but it looks very similar. Now you'll notice when I, go here, I can't mount the file space or connect to it because the web app, you can't connect to the file space. But I can browse the files in my file space. I can navigate around here. This one doesn't have much, but the sample media one has a whole bunch of stuff, files and folders in here. So I can navigate around various folders and, you know, look at different files. And if I want to, I could choose a file, and I can download it. Currently, you can only download files from the web app. Ultimately, you will be able to upload files. But you can also do all of the file space management and workspace management stuff that you can do in the desktop, you can do in the web app. So web app does provide quite a bit of functionality for you. In addition to the web app go here. We have mobile apps for iOS and Android. I'm not gonna show you them here, but they have very similar functionality to the web app. You'll be able to access and browse your files and folders and do some administrative functions if you're an administrator, in the mobile apps. And ultimately, you will be able to save files to your file space from the mobile apps, open files from there, probably also build in some players. But right now, you can download a file and open it on your mobile app, if you have an application that it can open that file type. So, same thing with the web application. Also later this year, we will be coming out with a full API and SDK public facing where you will be able to integrate LucidLink into your other applications or your workflow and do almost everything that you see here, whether it's management functions or file functions in your file space, through an API. So that is coming later this year. So let's get into creating and managing workspaces and file spaces. So just keep in mind that kind of the workspace is the organizing entity for your, file spaces. When you create a workspace, we have various plans and various pricing and bundled storage and and ways to progress through those plans. But you create that workspace. All the file spaces you create in it are part of that workspace, and your billing and pricing stuff is based on the workspace, not the file space. So if you have a business plan where you can have multiple file spaces in there, you know, we'll add up the storage and users for those to determine your billing at a workspace level, not at a file space level as it is in LucidLink Classic. What else should you know about workspaces and filespaces? You can create multiple workspaces, but each one will have its own plan. So its own pricing, and the group of filespaces in that workspace will, kinda determine what your pricing is. Now, I think that's the main things to know about workspaces and file spaces. Let's kinda get into the practical aspects. I'm gonna do it here in my Windows machine, but I could do it in any of them. And I'm gonna do it under my test workspace, which is actually still in a trial. Notice I am on a starter trial program. I can only create one file space there. So let me go to this workspace where I can create additional file spaces. And let's create well, let let's create a new workspace. In fact, I will go back to here and create a workspace. So this is my user that I'm logged in as. And to create a new workspace, I do that, and I can call this test two workspace. It's already I have to add something here. JP test two. So there's, my new JP test two workspace that's getting created. And, again, it's a trial because everything starts as a trial. And with the trial, I only get one file space. But, let's look at the workspace workspace settings first. So within a workspace, obviously, I can rename it, but I can only rename it because I don't have any file spaces in. Once I create more file spaces inside the workspace, I can't change the workspace name. That'll probably change later this year, but right now, you cannot change the workspace if you have any file spaces in that workspace. I can leave the workspace. I can delete the workspace. I can't leave the workspace because I created it, but I can delete the workspace. I can also associate that, workspace with a domain, an email domain for my organization. Now I would have to do that to create a organizational invite, which we'll get to when you look at members and groups. But, also, if I use implement single sign on with my workspace, I would also set up an email domain here. You'll see kinda how that would be useful when you when we get to the members, section. But I've created a workspace. Let I showed you how you know, and just for this UI. Workspaces are all listed here on the left hand side. You can, you know, navigate between them. And then, in here is the workspace menu. So this workspace doesn't have any file spaces. That's why it says create your first file space. Our workspace settings, we already looked at. Members and groups are at a workspace level, and, actually, members are kind of universal across LucidLink. But, members and groups are at workspace level, not at a file space level. Access and permissions can be allocated at a file space level. So let's create a file space here. We'll just call it test one and continue. And I'm just gonna pick the high performance storage and continue. I will pick a North American region and say create file space. Now this takes about a minute to set up and create, so I'm gonna let that go. And we're gonna kinda continue on with our slides, but we will come back to that file space we're creating right now. So we're gonna look at file space global settings, deleting a file space, snapshot schedules, which are still managed at a file space level because you might have different requirements for your snapshot schedules. And currently, you have to use the default snapshot snapshot schedule. Probably in the next month to two months, you will be able to customize your snapshot schedules if you have an enterprise plan. So, just keep that in mind. So inviting and managing members and access control. So we're gonna kinda go through this, here. Looks like it my file space is created. So let's connect to it. When I connect to it, I will see that it's mounting the file space. And there it is. It's connected, and I can open it in my Windows file manager on my PC, and there's no folder here. So I'm gonna create a folder. So new folder. Let's just call it j p test folder. And let's go to my Mac and take a look at this. But, actually, let me create a user first. So in this file space, I want to actually, in the workspace, I want to create a member and invite a member to it. So I'm gonna create a new member here. And I'm gonna do specific people, but I wanna point out that you can do this. If you have a business or enterprise plan, and I can show you in the other other workspace, but I'm just gonna explain it here. I can choose anyone in my organization I wanna create an invite link to. And then, I wouldn't put an email address. I'd put my, email domain in here. Once I do that, I generate a link that I can distribute to everybody where they click on the link to accept joining the workspace, and they have their own user within that workspace, but you didn't have to do a, you know, unique link or unique invite for every user. You just basically invited your whole company with the same email domain, to become a member. So I'm gonna do a specific person, and I'm gonna go j p two zero six five at g mail dot com. But I'm gonna do, plus four. And I don't have any groups yet, so I'm just going to generate an invite link there. So copy the invite link, and let's go to my Mac and act like we got that. Let me do this. This is very distracting. As you see, my, file space is showed up here as this login, but I'm gonna log out of this user. And I'm going to act like I got an email here. So let me bring this up. So the link that I got, whoo, looks like this at app dot lucid link dot com. And it has this very long invitation ID, which is an encrypted code that signifies that I have gotten an invitation. And if I click on the link and, you know, let's say you email the link to your users or you put it, you know, in your onboarding or some some platform that you share, maybe Slack or something like that. Oh, I'm currently logged in as this user. So the first thing I need to do is log out. So let me go back here and log out my user because it said, hey. You're not that user. I'm gonna log out. So now when I put that link in, I get this. I've been invited to the workspace. So I am going to say create a new account, and my email is plus four. They get started, and I gotta give it a password. They create account, and it wants me to verify my email address. So let me do that locally here because I do have my email up here with a filter, and let me refresh. So complete my registration. I'm gonna click on the verify email because that's really the key part of my invite. So that verified my email address, And it says I'm currently logged in, but it did verify my email address. So if I go back to my Mac, What should happen is I go back to the app here, and it's offering me to create a workspace for me, which, you know, I don't need that. What I wanna do is I want to see the workspace, but I don't see anything. Why not? Well, it's because my user has not been given access to that. So let me go back to my Windows here. Go to members management, and I have my workspace here. And I have the, user, and I need to manage this member and give them access to my file space. And I'm gonna give them access to the whole file space here. I'm gonna give them read write access. So you can do edit or view only access. I'm gonna give them read write access. So now if I go back to my Mac, I and this is on the the app. Why do I not see it? Let's see here. Log in to my desktop. J p two zero six. Home. And, actually, I wanna say that's four. Accepted the invite, and here I am. I should've just clicked on the accept the invite. So if I'd done that here, it would've shown me this. Sorry. Anyways, so here's my test file space. I can see my folder that I created here. I'm gonna mount it in my Mac so that we can look at some other stuff here. So let's, connect. And I have some test files. So I am going to look at these test files, files, and I am going to take, take this one, say, copy it, and copy it to my file space to this folder. So I'm gonna paste it there. And as that's pasting, because that's like a three point seven gigabyte file, if I come to to my local client here and look, I can see the file. And even though it's probably still uploading yes. You can see the upload icon on the this link there. I can start playing it right now. And as long as I don't get ahead of where the upload is, I should be able to jump around a bit, and the upload's probably almost done. If I jump to the end, yeah, he uses unsupported encoding settings. No. I'm just going to a place where the data hasn't gotten there yet. So if I go back try this again. Now I should be able to jump almost anywhere, and we'll start streaming the data there because the whole file has reached the cloud. So I uploaded this file, but I'm playing it in my Windows. I've uploaded it on my Mac. So that kind of shows you how LucidLink works. Let's go back to my Windows machine here and do some user management stuff. So access and permissions. Let's go to a little bit more complicated, setup here where I have some multiple file spaces in the workspace. What I can do is I can go to my members here, and I can add, j p twenty sixty five plus four. So I can invite j p two zero six five at g mail dot com. Let's say plus four. And I can make them an editor. And, yeah, it looks good. Generate an invitation link. So I copy that link, and, again, I can accept it inside my Mac. So let me bring a browser up here, and let's just paste that here. I've been accepted to invited to join this workspace. So there I am. So now I can see two file spaces or two workspaces with this user. Now notice when I go here, I can see sample me and test, but all I did was make myself a member of the editors group. Well, if I go here to my access and permissions or groups, actually, I can see the editors group has these three members now and has access to these three file spaces and but not this one because there's no access there. So if I wanna manage access for this, I can say I can view. So I only have edit access to sample media. So to manage your users and create invitations, you can go to members or groups because you might wanna create a new group. And once you've done that, you can set the permissions for those users. And, like, here's the three file spaces, and I can give them access to a particular folder. This is a personal folder that I don't want users to access, but maybe this folder, I can either add groups or members. So I could do j p two zero six five and add j p two zero six five four for access here, and I'll just say can view. Once I hit the checkbox, if I go back to my Mac, I should see, personal show up here. Oh, this is the web view. I go here. Okay. Anyways, that's how that works. So let's go back to our slides here. So that's how you manage permissions, create and manage groups and members. Let's talk about the command line interface. The command line looks the same and works the same, Mac, Windows, Linux. The first command you need to learn is lucid help. If you don't have LucidLink running the application, the desktop application, whether you're on Mac or Windows, it won't have the daemon running. So you won't be able to do the command line interface if you are only accessing through the web app. You must be running a daemon to use the command line interface. But once you do, if you type in lucid help, that's gonna show you a list of all the commands that you can run-in the command line interface. It'll usually show the usage, what options you have with that command. And in this case, because I'm just doing lucid help, it shows me all the commands I can run. Now if I wanna look at a particular, command, like, say, this lucid status that I ran earlier, I can type in lucid help status. This gives me the help file for the status. So lucid status is a useful one. But if I just type lucid status, it's gonna say multiple lucidly Lucid daemons were detected. To specify one, use either hyphen hyphen instance ID or hyphen hyphen name and the filespace dot domain or filespace dot workspace. So lucid hyphen hyphen instance two thousand one status would be the example of how to use this command. So it's saying to see the instance IDs, use this lucid list. So lucid list shows me the instances. And then from here, I can do lucid hyphen hyphen twenty eleven status. Oh, I forgot. ID. That. Okay. That shows me notice twenty eleven is personal dot l u, and the status for it shows the same thing. I can also do lucid hyphen hyphen name, say test one dot j p test two end status, and that directs it to that file space name. And it gives me some useful information. I'm connected, how my latency is, is my metadata up to date, you know, what the bucket team is, the provider and region, all that kind of information, what my mount point is. So that's Lucid status. Now we talked about the Lucid cache. If I want to see how much cache I have set up for this file space, I can type in cache. It shows me that the cache is enabled. I have a this is essentially the same as the block size. See the one megabyte block size? And, my cache limit is twenty five gigabytes. I currently only have sixty six hundred one megabytes in my cache. So when you set the cache size, the cache is going to grow to the size that you have set, and then the oldest data in the cache is gonna be overwritten first under the theory that you're working with data. We want the data you're working with to be in the cache because then we're not as reliant on your Internet speed to access it. So, we try to maintain the most recent data that you're working with in the cache so that you are less reliant on your Internet and you get faster performance. So that's the lucid cache command. Lucid lock is also a very handy command. I don't really have any applications working here, but, if I have test one let me look at a different file space here. I'm going to look at, which one? We'll do sample media. I'm gonna do that right now, but let's open a file in the sample media. And Let's see what we got in here. I don't think I have any files that are gonna work. Oh, let me create a file in here. Let me create it in this one. I'm gonna say a new. Let's call it Word doc. And let's open this Word doc. So I have a Word doc, and I'm typing some stuff in it, and I save. Let's look at this now. Ah, look. My, client has a file open, new Microsoft Word doc, and it is locked. Exclusive lock because I'm writing to it. So now if anybody opens this file so elsewhere, they won't be able to write to it because we have a lock on it. If I close Word and I run the lock command again, well, it still has it on the main one. Let's see how long it has it. Should it expire a second now? We'll come back and look at that in a minute. Let's go to our slide deck here. Cache, lucid lock. Oh, performance analysis and configuring set settings via the CLI. That is very useful stuff to know. Let's see if the lock is doing anything. Oh, let's look at performance. So a sample media, I am going to run a LucidPerf. Now what a LucidPerf is, it's the performance monitor for for working with LucidLink. You know, your applications are only really aware up to the cache. So when you write a file, you know, save it to the file space. Once it's all hit the cache, your application thinks it's done. It's not done because there you know, it has to upload to the cloud storage to be the sole source of truth. So seeing the data as it flows up to the cloud is very useful, and that's what LucidPerf does. So under LucidPerf, you have a time stamp here as you can see the samples every two seconds. Under FS, that is the operating system in your application's activity. What read write activity does it have in the file space? So that's kind of the the start of your data or the end of the data if you're reading data from the cloud. After that is the cache. Remember, the data comes down from the cloud into the cache and then goes to the application. So the cache is kind of in the middle. And if you're writing data from the app, it comes from the FS. It goes into the cache, and then it goes up to the object storage. So this shows read and write speeds in each of the locations, your application, the cache, and the object storage. And under object storage, get input is the same as read and write. So if I open a file in this file space, let's see what we got in here. Media, video, and I have no idea what's in here because I've never accessed these files. In fact, you could tell it's downloading stuff just going to this folder because it's generating the thumbnails for them, which the application needs to access the file to be able to generate the thumbnails. So you can see this data activity already. You'll let that finish before I do anymore. So it looks like it's not gonna be able to do that with these files. Not sure why maybe they're with codecs that my desktop doesn't have. So if I open this file here and just play it in a player alright. It's playing now, and what happens when I pause it is the data should stop flowing, and it does. If I hit play again, it's gonna start flowing again, and then it pauses. But you can see the data coming from the object storage to the cache to FS so that I can see the data flow in the cloud. The other thing to note is, let's say I take this file and I make a copy of it. So I copy it. What I'll be doing here is I will read the file and write the file into the file space because the data comes down and it goes back out of my client. So it's copying, and you can see the gets. And then right after that the puts are starting. So as it's been reading, it writes back, and now it's finishing the puts. And it's almost done, and it's done. So now the file has been copied. Now notice if I delete this file actually, is that the one I wanna delete? I wanna make sure I delete the right one here. That's the copy. So let me send that to the trash. Reason being, I have projects here. I don't wanna delete the stuff that is tied to the projects here. But that's how LucidPerf works. It's very, useful for seeing what's going on. Now notice the lock is expired on my my word. It's at most sixty seconds for locks. Now Lucid perf, if I type in Lucid help perf, you will see, it say okay. So the usage is LucidPerf, LucidPerf explain, and, a number of options that you have here, quite a few options. Why are there so many options? Because in reality, LucidPerf can measure a lot of other metrics that may not be relevant to you but are very relevant to, support with troubleshooting. So things like the metadata. You can actually do a Lucid perf all, which will show the full list of all metrics, but that is really hard to read. So if I just do a Lucid perf, here and, actually, let me do the help. Lucid, perf. Might give me trouble here, but we'll see. Explain. Yeah. It wants me to go here. Explained. What explain does is it gives me, details. So you'll see in the health, explain, it shows me all of the options under each category. So under the FS category, I can get all of these metrics. Under encryptor category, I can get these prefetcher cache. There's lots and lots of metrics I can measure. For the most part, Lucid Perf, the basic one, is sufficient for most people's use. We have another one called Lucid, latency. And very similar to Lucid Perf, this will show on active data activity. So if I say access this file, what I will start seeing here is these are the blocks. You know, if I jump here, it will show the blocks retrieval and what the latency is. And latency is the delay in retrieval. So, I can see, you know, latency around one second, some at half a second, some a little more than a second, two and a half seconds. But lucid latency is also very useful for troubleshooting. I do want to give you an idea of performance expectations. You need to know what performance you need to perform your workflow. Best example I use is XDCAM fifty video is a fifty megabit bit rate video. And if you just need to play that video from the cloud, I'll tell you that I'd like you to see about a hundred megabit download speed on that client to safely, smoothly play that video from the cloud. Why so much more? Why double the bandwidth? Well, because of that latency. The farther away you are from the object storage, even though data moves at the speed of light, it takes time. You know, if I have a file space and I'm nearby it, that latency might be, you know, in the milliseconds range. I can probably smoothly play the fifty megabit video file from the cloud, with sixty megabits of download speed on my Internet connection. But if my latency is very high, let's say that file space is in Australia and I'm here in Nashville, Tennessee. I might need more than a hundred megabits to download that fifty megabit file in real time where I'm getting it fast enough to play smoothly. So work out the bit rate of your workflow that you require performance wise and, figure out what your latency is. I usually start at double the bandwidth. So let's say I'm using an XDCAM fifty video, but I have a four camera video edit, so I need to be able to stream four streams of that. Four times fifty is two hundred megabits. I would tell you I would like to see about a four hundred megabit download speed for that workflow to work smoothly from the cloud. I in the one zero one webinar, we do talk a bit about how to overcome the limitations of your Internet speed using the cache. But, performance expectations, that's kinda what I look at is latency will drive your performance along with your available bandwidth, and the bandwidth requirements for the workflow. So, configuring settings via the command line interface. I do wanna point out, the config command. So if I take this and type in config, well, this shows me a bunch of different settings. Now some of these you can set through the app. You know, if I wanna look at these file locking extensions and to be honest, I'm gonna have to do help config to see that I have a bunch of different options here for my code config. And I can set a configuration, and I can list them. I just listed them. You don't actually need to enter that. And no trim is don't trim long configuration values. So let's look. This is obviously a long configuration value. And if I go to my app, I can go to the sample media and look at my file space settings. You can see this is the file locking extensions, but it's too big on the command line. So what I can do is I can go here and say no trim. And now it showed me the whole list of locking extensions that are the same is in the app. So, all of the config, items in the command line, you can modify command line, and you would do it basically like this. You'd say set, say local or global, and maybe you want to set maximum download connections. And then I wanna set it to ninety six because I have faster Internet. I have to enter a admin password because I'm setting it global. But now if I look at the, config, we'll see that I'm set to that. I can if I wanna change it back, I can just change it back here. So that's how you set your configuration at the command line. Troubleshooting and incident reporting, and we are getting down to the bottom of the hour. If you have any questions, definitely, put those in the chat, and we'll try to address any questions that you have. But let me run through the troubleshooting and incident reporting. I wanna take you through our support portal, show you where our knowledge base and frequently asked questions are, as well as explain how to submit a support request, and also touch on some other resources that are available for you. So if you go to our website and, actually, I'm gonna do it on a incognito window here. Just because it's very useful. If you go to support dot lucid link dot com, this is our support portal. And we actually have two support portals. If you click the switch to LucidLink classic, it'll go to the knowledge base and ticket system and everything for the classic LucidLink. Because they're different and we didn't want people to get confused, we confused them by having two knowledge bases. But at least they're separate now. So if you're on the new LucidLink, you just just go to support dot lucid link dot com. If you go to the classic, it's gonna take you to the support classic. But as you see here, this is kind of an entree to the knowledge base. We have these four big categories. We have some featured articles, and you can just search for things. So if you wanna see how to set up your firewall to work with, LisaLink, you can go here, and this is a knowledge base article that has the settings that you need to, look at. These categories, getting started, we have a number of articles on getting started, and many of them have videos. So for a workspace owner, you can go here. There's a short video that kinda helps you get started in using LucidLink and configuring your file space and all the stuff we've kind of been covering here. We have administration, a bunch of knowledge base articles for that, including setting up a single sign on, things related to workflows, how to set up workflows with various video editing and design platforms, well, even articles on backup and business continuity workflows, and then advanced stuff, things around the command line interface, troubleshooting and setting up, various object storage providers. So we have a very, extensive knowledge base. And if you're like, I don't know. I would need to set up Premiere Pro. Well, we have articles that have that in here. So we have workflow tutorials, optimizing, Premiere Pro settings, the LucidLink panel for Premiere Pro, which is kind of another product that we have that allows you to manage your cache, manage your workflow within Premiere Pro. So search is very useful for, finding the knowledge base articles you're looking for. But, obviously, the categories you can kinda dig in and and look for the article you want that way. Now getting help with a problem. The first thing is the chatbot. You can start in the chatbot here. Our support chatbot has access to all the knowledge base articles I can put in a question like, how do I get LucidLink to work with my firewall? And the the chatbot will look through the knowledge base and give us some options here as well as an article about the firewall and ask whether you're whether it's helpful for you. If it's not, then you can reach out to an agent, check for an agent. I'm not gonna do that now and bother our support team. But if a support agent is available, you'll be able to interact with them right then. They don't usually troubleshoot through the chatbot. If you have a quick question, they may answer it. But if you have a more in-depth problem, they're just gonna make sure they have the, information that they need to be able to properly troubleshoot and resolve your issues. So they might ask you for logs or ask you some questions to clarify what you're putting in there. When they're done getting what they need, they'll probably end the chat, and then you'll be managing that incident, via a support ticket. But the fastest way and and easiest way is to submit a request submit a support request. You click on the button here, put in your email and the subject, what kind of problem you're having, whether it's incident or billing or a feature request or just a question, which version we ask? Obviously, we are in the, new LucidLink, support portal. So, usually, that's what people will choose when they're on this page. But just to give you a chance, if you're on LucidLink Classic, you can do it here even though the ticket's on the, new LucidLink portal. Put your file space name. And when I say file space, do file space dot work space or file space dot domain if it's a classic file space. With that file space name and a reference ID, we will be able to start looking at your logs, figuring out what's going on, and give you advice on how to resolve it. So, in the client, when you're looking at your file spaces, you can go up here to this question mark and generate a diagnostic report. It will upload your logs and some other information on your computer, but that's the easiest way to give us the information we need to troubleshoot your problem. When you do that, it will give you a reference ID like it shows in this knowledge base article, right here. So this reference ID, again, along with the, request, file space name and domain name or workspace name will allow us to begin troubleshooting. Now in the description, put a good description of the problem you're having. I was doing this when this happened or this unexpected behavior happened. Put a decent description in it. And, also, you can attach things. So you can attach a screenshot or a video or if if your client isn't running and you can't generate a diagnostic report, you can attach log files. How do you get log files? Well, I don't know. Let's look in the knowledge base for logs. Oh, collecting the LucidLink client logs. There's a knowledge base article that shows you how to do this on the different operating systems. So you can generate those log files, with the with the diagnostic report, or you can just upload them to the ticket, using that attachment here. So once you do that, we will get to work on your problem. We respond typically in under fifteen minutes for an initial response to the ticket. If you've already given us a diagnostic report, so we have a chance to look at logs, our first response might be a little longer than fifteen minutes, but when we give you the first response, it's going to be addressing your problem directly. Because oftentimes, the first response is, hey. Can you send us your logs or a diagnostic report? So be sure you include that in the original response, and you will get your problem solved faster. So in addition to this, we do have some resources on our website. So if you go to our website under resources, you will see we have a blog that has all kinds of articles on different things that work with LucidLink. We have plenty of events, demos, partner demos, people that have integrated LucidLink in their workflows, sharing how they do that and what they do with LucidLink. We also have a Slack community. So under resources, if you go here to Slack community, it's going to take you to join our Slack community, which in Slack looks like this. So our Slack community, we have twenty five hundred users in here, people from all walks of life, all different levels of skill around LucidLink and around media and entertainment, AC, enterprise gaming, all kinds of different workflows. So you can kinda see, you know, what other people do to resolve a problem or or work with a different application, and interact with that team, can be very useful. The last thing I'll show you is YouTube. Here's our channel. So we do have tons of videos on, our LucidLink YouTube channel. So that's a great resource also if you have any questions or wanna kinda see various ways to use LucidLink. So that's pretty much our, webinar today. I'd like to thank you for joining. I'm happy to answer any questions, but I don't see any here in the chat. So thank you for attending our two zero one webinar for administrators. Definitely join the one on one. It's very useful. We focus on the client and, kinda getting the best use out of LucidLink as a user, and it can be very helpful to you, as an administrator to see what users are advised and, help your users. So I hope you don't end up in support at support dot LucidLink dot com. But if you do know that we are do gonna do all we can to help you get productive use out of LucidLink in your business and your workflows. Thank you for joining us today, and I hope you have a great rest of your week. Bye now.