"Mark Smith" wrote in message
om...
Hello Michael,

No it's not Linux *spit* ;-) More likely a derivative of a RTOS like
vxWorks or something (I did know what was used once, but my brain only
holds so much information and old stuff drops out over time :-)

Darn.... If it were some sort of *nix derivative, then you could do all
sorts of umm....creative stuff with it. ;-)

Your boss might just be restricting access to stop "accidents", if
you've any critical systems/applications on your SAN then I wouldn't
go playing with it ... see if you can get a test rig to mess about on,
or bug your boss for training (point out that it's always a good idea
to have a couple of staff members skilled up in case of emergencies).

Eh, the boss *is* the accident. ;-)

May I ask what it is you think you're boss is doing poorly ?

Well, it's stuff like this...each server on the SAN has two fibre cards (one
to each fibre switch: primary and secondary). We had to do a firmware
upgrade and he managed to take the entire service down, even though we were
doing one switch at a time. We also swapped out the secondary switch once
and he somehow messed up the zoning such that all the database drives were
dropped (once again, bringing down the service). The guy types with his
thumbs so I had to go in and redo the zoning all myself (since I type oh, I
don't know...8 million times faster than he does).

The thing is....I'm quite certain that the constant problems we have aren't
typical of most SAN users and it just seemed to me that there had to be a
better option to configure the SAN without having to use this stupid, slow
Java GUI. So yeah, I was hoping it'd be a Linux derivative so I could do
something like this:

1) Prepare for a switch swap/upgrade/whatever by recreating the
configuration files beforehand
2) Mount the new switch with the new config files
3) Schedule to work, then swap the cables into the new switch ports

The downtime of the primary or secondary side would only be the time it took
to swap the ports and re-establish the paths. Of course, these things don't
run a *nix OS so I guess it doesn't work that way....or can it?


Michael

[snip]