Category Archives: Brocade Technical

Non-disclosed posts. For private use.

Why FDMI is compulsory (or should be!!)

FDMI stands for Fabric Device Management Interface and is such an enormously cool feature and unfortunately one of the least used. From an operational management perspective FDMI provides a wealth of information to the fabric regarding the attached devices. The thing that flabbergasted me is that almost no device (HBA/Array) has this turned on of even has the functionality embedded.

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Open Source Software (OSS) and security breaches in proprietary firmware

It is no secret that many vendors use open source software in their products and solutions. One of the most ubiquitous  is Linux which is often the base of many of these products and used as core-OS because of it’s flexibility and freely available status without the need of keeping track of licenses (to some extent) and costs.

These OSS tools have different development back-grounds and are subject to policies of the person (or people/companies) who develop it. This obviously results in the fact that defects or bugs may result in security issues especially when it involves network related applications. Recently the bugs in OpenSSL and Apache have gain much traction as some of these are fairly significant and can result in access breaches or denial of service.

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