If you’re seeing excessive “Time BB Credits Zero” in the gui, or tim_txcrd_z in portstatsshow, you may want to bump up the buffer credits.

WARNING: This may be broken n 6.1.0h firmware. I’m looking into it. For now, I’m running an expect script from a remote host to do these backups.

The following will backup your switch config over FTP to a remote server daily. If you have to replace your switch, you can just do a configdownload after getting it on the network to restore all your settings.

To make this happen, I created a short shell script to upload into the cron directory on the switch. You can transfer this file via SCP. I had problems with FileZilla’s SCP, so I copied it from another host, which worked fine. Just put this in a file and upload it to /etc/cron.daily/ on the switch.

#!/bin/sh

# configbackup
#
# Author: Patrick Vaughan - 7-1-09
#
# Purpose:
#       Do a configupload to a remote FTP server.  This process does a backup
#           from AD 255, so as to get all the Zoning configuration.
#
# Change Log:
#
# License:
#   Copyright (C) 2009  Patrick Vaughan
#
#    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program.  If not, see .

DEST_HOST="192.168.1.1"
DEST_USER="ftp_user"
DEST_DIR="/export/sansw"
HOSTNAME=`/bin/hostname`
PASSWORD="password"

/fabos/link_abin/ad --exec 255 "/fabos/link_sbin/configupload -p ftp "$DEST_HOST","$DEST_USER","$DEST_DIR/$HOSTNAME.cfg","$PASSWORD"" > /dev/null

exit

Here are the default passwords I have for Brocade switches. All the passwords should be changed with the root account before merging into the fabric:

root fibranne
root password
admin password

When tuning for performance, the segment size can make a noticeable difference. The segment size is the size of each transaction in kilobytes between the disk controllers and each physical disk. This can be changed under Logical Drive -> Change -> Segment Size.

The procedure to configure the network ports on the FAStT controller is poorly described in the FAStT Storage Manager Installation and Support Guide, but we worked this out. Some FastT’s have a slightly different process to setup the network, but they’re all very similar.

The FastT has a global pool of hot spare disks, hot spares do not need to be in the same drawer as the failing disk. It will first look for any hot spares defined in the same drawer as the failed drive, then it looks at the last hot spares defined.

The cache block size is the size of each memory block used for caching, the only two options are 4k and 16k. The cache block size should be set to the size of the average work unit, or less. Never exceed the size of the average work unit. For instance, if you are using Oracle with an 8k segment size, you should use 4k. Using 16k will result in each cache block only bing half utilized. Using 4k will use two blocks, but they will both be filled. This can be changed under Storage Subsystem -> Change -> Cache Settings.

It’s recommended to keep everything in the enterprise on the same time to make troubleshooting easier if nothing else. Brocade Fibre Channel Switches can use an NTP server to keep time. The principle switch polls the NTP server and the updates are propagated to the entire fabric.