If you work with Brocade gear you might have come across their management tool called Brocade Network Advisor. A very nifty piece of software which lets you do almost 99% of all things you want to do with your fabrics whether is FOS or NOS based.

When you work in support you often need logs and the Brocade switches provide these in two flavours: the useful and useless. (ie supportsave vs supportshow respectively)

If you need a reference of your configuration and want to do some checking on logs and configuration settings a supportSHOW is useful for you. When you work in support you most often need to dig a fair bit deeper and thats where the supportSAVE comes into play. Basically it’s a collection method of the entire status of the box including ASIC and linux panic dumps, stack-traces etc. This process runs on the CP itself so its not a screengrab of tekst as you can imagine.

Normally when you collect these you’ll log into the switch and type “supportsave”, fill in the blanks and some directory on your ftp or ssh system fills up with these files which you then zip up and send to your vendor.

If you have a large fabric please make sure you collect these files per switch in a subfolder and upload these seperatly !!!!!

If you are in the luck position you have BNA you also can collect these via this interface. The BNA process will create the subfolders for you and zip these up for later.

When you look in the zip-file you’ll see that  all filenames have the following structure:

“Supportinfo-date-time\switcname-IPaddress-switchWWN\“

Obviously if you work on a Windows box to extract all this Windows will create all subfolders for you. Given the fact I do my work on a Linux box I get one large dump of files with the same file-names as depicted above without the directory structure so every files from every switch is still located in the same folder. This is due to the fact Linux (or  POSIX in general) allows the “\” as a valid character in the file name and the “/” is used for folder separation. 🙁

I used to come across this every so now and then and it didn’t anoy me to such an extent to fix it but lately the use of this collection method (BNA style)  seems to increase so i needed something simple to fix it.

Since Linux can do almost everything i wrote this little oneliner to create a subfolder per switch and move all files belonging to that switch into that folder:

1. #!/bin/bash
2. pushd $@
3. for i in `ls`;do x=$(echo $i | awk -F\\ ‘{print $3 }’);y=$(echo $i | awk -F\\ ‘{print $2 }’); mkdir -p $y; mv $i $y/$x; done
4. popd

Link this to a Nautilus-script softlink and a right click in the Nautilus file manager will do the trick for me.

Voila, lots of time saved. Hope it helps somebody.

Cheers,
Erwin