I’ve been using Brocade SAN switches for a while now, and always wondered how to find where in a fabric a device is connected using the switch command line – like you can through the Java GUI Name Server dialog. The switchshow command lists the WWNs of devices connected to a switch, and you can dump the local nameserver with the nsshow command – but these only show the devices connected to the switch that you’ve logged into. The nsallshow command reports all of the fabric addresses in the fabric – but this is fairly useless as there doesn’t seem to be any other commands that use fabric addresses, or resolve them to WWNs!
Finally I’ve discovered the two commands:
nscamshownodefindnscamshow shows the contents of the name server’s on remote switches in the fabric, and nodefind allows you search the name server for a device by WWN, Port ID, or alias. If you’re searching with nodefind and the WWN, then you’ll get back a hexadecimal PID in which the first two octets are the switch ID and the next two are the port number. You can then find the switch IDs using fabricshow.
Annoying, neither of these commands is referenced from the man pages for nsshow, nsallshow, or switchshow – so it’s no wonder I never found them.
The following command dumps all of the WWNs in the name server and the switches they are on:
(nscamshow; echo “Switch entry for local”; nsshow) | grep -E ‘^(Switch| *N )’
Time to re-read the manuals and see if there are any other interesting commands I’ve missed.