More studying. Only a month and a half to go.

Currently repeating/re-reading BCFA stuff and mostly focusing on the new stuff. Expect to do this this whole week but gradually weave in more BCFP stuff.

An idea – I don’t think I need to re-hearse the BCFA that much. The objectives between the two exams are very different and there’s no overlap as far as I can tell. Focusing more on the BCFP now but it was nice anyway to do a short repeat of the BCFA stuff, get back in the game.

The Material

I’ve been going through what’s recommended (the material) and these are the useful pages:
Please note that the second item in each list is the actual page number in the document.
I also took the liberty of adding pages before/after in case they were adding context to the page. It’s not like I’m going to try to remember the pages by heart. And quite often the pages referenced by Brocade were just one page in the middle of a chapter.

For example page 63 in FOS Admin Guide 7 is either about setting ipaddr or routing/FC NAT. I think it’s the FC NAT. Page 77 is either for adressing/WWN based PID assignment or lossless DLS. Page 80 is port numbering schemes for various blades or Forward Error Correction. 99 is verifying syslog/audit log or introduction to RADIUS/LDAP. 117-118 is lossless DLS or overview of IP protocols.
Page 3 in the troubleshooting guide is to the document history or one of the pages with list of common symptoms. Also Page 1 in FCIP Admin Guide is probably not the one they meant :)

There’s some really weird ones in the admin guide. For example page 582 does not exist in FOS admin or 132 is empty in FCIP Admin guide , in both real page counters and the numbers on the pages in the book.

Also some starting/ending points/pages are a little strange, why cut it off there and not the whole chapter/section?

From the Brocade Certified group on facebook I saw that these pages numbers were used to writing a/questions on the exam. Guess this explains why some of the pages are odd, maybe they were written down at a previous version of the document or they just don’t want to document everything :) In the same group they claim that the page they used is the one on the actual page, not the one in for example adobe reader. This means the numbers under Real are the ones pointing to the right pages.

Anyway, with the details from http://community.brocade.com/docs/DOC-2041 here we go:

Updated the numbers on FOS Admin guide (2011-08-18)

• Fabric OS Administrators Guide v7.0 (53-1002148-02)
  • Pages 63,77,80,99,100,117,118,128,133,137,200,272-281,287-302,372,382,395,404-412,413,418,422-433,435-438,447-481,582
  • Real Pages: 102-103, 120, 139, 168, 173-174, 177, 240, (271-303), 311-343, 410, 412, 422, 435, 444-453, 458-478, 487-521,
• Fabric OS Command Reference Guide v7.0 (53-1002147-01)
  • Pages 239,244-246,283-290,380-383,609,610,637,653,661-663,701-710,714-717,824,885,930,953-956,1028,1029,1083
  • Real Pages: 273, 278-280, 316-324, 643, 644, 671, 687, 695-697, 735-744, 748-751, 857-858, 918-920, 964, 987-990, 1061-1063
• Fabric OS Troubleshooting Guide v7.0 (51-1002150-02)
  • Pages 3,22,31,38,92,
  • Real Pages: 23, 43-44, 51-52, 112
• Brocade 1860 Datasheet (GA-DS-1566-00)
• Brocade SAN Health Family Data Sheet (GA-DS-870-03)
• Fabric OS v7.0 Release Notes
  • Pages 11,12
  • Real Pages: 11, 12
• Brocade Network Advisor SAN User Manual 11.1.x (53-1002167-01)
  • Pages xxxviii,xxxix,47-52,148,202,230-233,647,648,782,911
  • Real Pages: 38-39, 91-96, 192, 246, 274-277, 691-692, 826, 955
• Brocade Network Advisor Installation Guide 11.1.x (53-1002320-01)
  • Page 9
  • Real Page: 9
• Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide (53-1002155-01)
  • Pages 1,6,29-37,54,111-113,132
  • Real Pages: 15, 20-21, 43-52, 68, 125-127
• Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide (53-1002156-01)
  • Pages 11,22,52,53,67-69,
  • Real Pages: 31, 42, 72-73, 87-89
• Brocade Adapters Administrator’s Guide (53-1001923-01)
  • Page 35
  • Real Page: 57
• Pre-release CFP 300 Course (unedited material)
  • Modules 2-8

I am currently going for the BCFP – fabric professional – exam, but I did the BCFA 6 months ago so I’ll re-read the material and of course there’s the new stuff with FOS 7, new hardware, 16g, new ASIC that I should probably learn as well.

Some new stuff

‘fabric name’ is a new feature. But this is also more usable in VF – which is not part of BCFA. Firmware upgrades are the same (phew).
DCFM is now called Network Advisor and it also has IP/routing and MPLS functionality now.
Of course the 16G blades (with the first 8 ports capable of handling 10GB FC) and the FC10-6 blades.
D_port diagnostics (set a port to this before joining it to a trunk, or use it to measure distance on a long distance link, is accurate up to 5m).
IDLE/ARB fill words are no longer necessary to configure (except on 8G platforms and not on Condor3).
Condor3 is the new ASIC for the 16G blades.
New/larger/longer/better ICL between the new directors that use QSFP instead of the crap max 2m copper cable.

Kindle

One thing that’s great about the kindle is that you can put the Brocade material on it (even in PDF) – just change viewing mode to landscape/horizontal and it will look great. Two pages per slide. I still have material from my old so that one works. But the material that is given for free now has 0 access rights so it does not work on the Kindle.

The way I write my personal notes is: write them off from the brocade material in my own words.

1. I do this on google docs.
2. I then download it into .doc and then
3. e-mail it as an attachment to youraccount@free.kindle.com.
4. Then next time you hook up your kindle to wifi it will download the documents, converted to .azw.

What’s important here is to not use lists, as the conversion from a google doc saved as word and then e-mailed to youraccount@free.kindle.com does not like lists, it only takes the first level in the list.

I instead used headers, lost of them.

This is also nice because you can put a TOC which is clickable on the kindle.

Also pictures work in this conversation.