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The DCX man has retired.
In 2008 Brocade announced the 8G director class switches DCX and DCX-4S. A rather impactful release of a new piece of hardware where the next generation FC ASIC saw light. The Condor.The marketing department of Brocade back then had probably been smoking something as the introduction of the platform was accompanied with a rather cringy “Marvel-like” super-hero called DCX-man. (uhhhhh… shivers….)
Crackdown on FOS support
If you’ve read my articles over the last decade or so you’ve seen I’m keen on maintenance. Both from a physical hardware as well as software perspective a storage environment needs to be kept in tip-top shape at all times.
BNA before 14.4.1 is no longer supported
I’ve already mentioned that BNA was End-of-Life and will/is (be) replaced by SANNav.
As of the time of this writing any BNA version older than 14.4.1 is no longer supported. This basically means that your BNA (or any OEM version) older than that release is not being looked at when yo have a problem with it.
Storage Videos – Troubleshooting – High CPU utilisation
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Preventing client DNS leaking on OpenWRT
A while ago I wrote an article whereby I provided an OpenDNS resolver server via DHCP to the computers, tablets and phones of my kids. (See here). This worked very well and I have been able to keep the nastiness of the web out of sight. Plus it gave me the option to block certain sites which were not captured under a certain category or, if those domains fell under a category that also included a lot of useful domains, exclude them.
Initiator, Target, Both or None ??
Whenever you’ve encountered an output of a nameserver entry you may have come across the phenomenon that the fabric has no clue what the attached device is. For a FC switch an attached device (or N-port in technical terms) is not more than a source or destination where frames originate from or can be sent to. As soon as smarter functions are required it may be helpful (or required) to be able to obtain more information from that device.
Brocade Network Advisor (BNA) is End-of-Life
So the final nail is in the coffin. Brocade Network Advisor is being put to rest. The juggling of Java code to the ever expanding demand of functions, features and other capabilities was no longer sustainable. Oracle starting to charge for Java would’ve made the decision even easier.
The replacement is SANNav (No I don’t get into the same discussion VMWare has with which character should be capitalized or not. :-))
Getting rid of whitespace
No, not storage related but more towards coding scripts etc and assuring your git repositories do not show up with huge diff sections you need to correct. Just a little tip and a “note to self”.
If you’ve event been keen enough to not use an IDE for whatever language you use and kept to a real editor (VIM obviously.. :-)) you may have encountered the phenomenon that whitespace at the end of lines is a nasty thing to look at when you start putting stuff into version control repositories like Subversion or GIT. A little change from some copy or past action may leave you with a “git diff” of a couple of hundred lines you need to correct.
To fix that simply let VIM clear out all empty whitespace (tabs, spaces, etc.) by having these removed before the actual write to disk.
To do that simply add
autocmd BufWritePre *.sh :%s/\s\+$//e
to your ~/.vimrc and with every :w the substitute function driven by the regex after the colon will remove it all in all shell scripts (*.sh). Obviously you can add every extension you need here. Very handy.
Cheers,
Erwin
SFP in -INF state
The entire IT industry is packed with mathematics. So instead of keeping things easy we need to work our way around imposed restriction that have been imposed on us by history.
When hardware was developed 1 to 5 decades ago things were (maybe still are) very expensive. Every corner was cut to keep costs low in order to be to sell anything. You can have the latest and greatest but if you’re pricing yourself out of the market the shelf-life of your shares becomes very short and at some stage you basically cease to exist. Companies like DEC and SUN have found out the hard way. Fabulous marvels of engineering but lack of sales and marketing efforts aligned to that engineering feat basically failed to gain sufficient traction in the market and as such they are no more.
Going back to the hardware restrictions and the SFP -INF state
You may encounter some output from an sfpshow (Brocade) or “show transceiver detail” (Cisco) like this:
Temperature: 46 Centigrade
Current: 6.428 mAmps
Voltage: 3261.5 mVolts
RX Power: -inf dBm (0.0 uW)
TX Power: -3.3 dBm (464.2 uW)
So what does that mean? Read on.