Don pointed out that the vw4tool.bat was not working. It’s been resolved.
There was an edit in version 1.0.75 which quoted convenience BAT files for robustness. Unfortunately, this caused the conversion of vic.bat file into vw4tool.bat file to fail, so every vw4tool.bat was an exact copy of vict.bat.
The conversion is fixed, and vw4tool.bat should work as intended.
The various tools in the FAE Toolkit often run on Java with a BAT file for convenience in a Windows environment (which typically lack a “java” on the command-line PATH). This release simply squeezed an additional place to look for a JRE into the various convenience scripts.
Issues in FTPS on the servers necessitated deactivation of FTPS: currently only the official HQ-based FTP server has FTPS.
Cisco’s output format changes — this is to be expected, it’s a text stream, not a structured markup, and I’m somewhat surprised it’s been static for this long.
Due to these changes, and the fact that FibreChannel-Parsers currently doesn’t offer zoning information from a cisco “show zones” which would allow it to replace the stage1 of a zone-vote, some quick changes were necessary to the AWK script that plays one of the adapting stage1, the “make it canonical” stage.
Usage remains the same, no changes in output or behavior.
This release activated FTPS by dependency on the servers but may be rolled back, lacking a pem for self-signed certificate
I recently added quoting to the %JAR% (and equiv) in BAT files to survive spaces in pathnames
Chris found onsite that if the pathname for a vict.jar in DOS has a space, the VICT.BAT convenience BAT file might get confused in some circumstances. Embarrassing as that is, it’s now fixed.
Thanks, Chris, again!
Chris indicated that the sync limitation of 2 at a time was a nuisance. I opened that up. If you don’t know what this is, hey, you’ve never been impacted 🙂
Sync your FAE Toolkit!
This edit allows two additional “protocol” values: instead of just http, ftp, bnapsql, dcnmsql, and the formats listed on FibreChannel-Parsers docs, this adds:
For example, I’ve been hammering away at it using a command like this:
java -jar vict.jar -N dcnmcql://admin:adminpass@192.168.1.130/ -n nick.csv
… and I would see that the collection extracted 3 DeviceAliases.
The DCNM CQL client draws out Device Aliases, but I haven’t found fcaliases yet.
The BNA CQL client will draw out Zone Aliases, but not Aliases of the non-zone-alias sort.
Why? I needed a CIM-XML client for some work I was doing, and I had the code loosely working so that I could use it to test the other real deliverable. Since I had a DCNM client already, I split the Cisco-specific stuff out, and slotted in a BNA client. The DCNM client (via dcnmcql) is working just fine, but I don’t have a test server to beat up with the BNA client. It works in theory?
How is this useful? Not a whole lot, since VW4 will use a protocol like these to collect information, but I’d like to point out something:
this doesn’t need a license
This would actually let a customer check “will VW4 see all of my aliases?” which — as Application Engineers and Deployment Techs know — is actually a fairly long pole in the circus tent of VW4 deployments.
This release is simply a bug fix: Chris Carlton gave the vict.jar a command that caused a parser to be not-sane; the resulting null propagated, and trashed out the entire parser. Unfortunately, the exception cascaded to the array of parsers, breaking isolation and tearing down all the parsers.
This would affect both vict.jar and vw4tools.jar as both share the underlying FibreChannel-Parsers
I need to create wrapping exception blocks to stop repeats of the cascade, but in the short-term this one symptom is resolved in this release. …with my apology.
I created a specific instance of the NicknameParser as a convenience: I worked with a colleague on a limited environment wherein he could not run a “awk -f swap-1-2.awk” to swap columns, and wasn’t getting results from the parser. To be honest, it took us both too long to realize that the simple WWPN/Nickname order was swapped to Nickname/WWPN.
I hate being surprised by software when there’s a deadline; as well, I like to cater to jet-lagged Application Engineers and anyone who “just wants to get the gig done”.
This adds a NicknameParser as a --nickname=file.csv;WWN=1;Nickname=0 but avoids having to explain that. This situation is common enough, this addition just helps get it done with very little drawback.
FibreChannel-Parsers added the SwappedNicknameParser; vitools includes a test case to ensure that the fcparsers.jar picked up during the build includes the convince feature.