Unsupported BNA Hacks

Here’s a couple of quick hacks for working with Brocade Network Advisor. It’s unsupported, but you can run BNA on Ubuntu. You can also suppress the client-side JRE version mismatch warning.

Ubuntu Install

If you try to install BNA on Ubuntu, it fails during the DB initialization & setup phase. There are two reasons for this:

  • gawk is not where the installer thinks it should be
  • Some scripts run as /bin/sh, but use bashisms.

Before running the installation, make these two changes:

  • Run sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gawk /bin/gawk
  • Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash and select “No”

After that the DB setup will complete. Leaving the gawk symlink in place won’t hurt anything else. You can probably change the system shell back to dash, but you may run into problems if you run any of the BNA utility scripts.

Client-side JRE check

When you launch the BNA Desktop client, it checks your local JRE version against a list of supported versions. It’s reasonably up to date, but Java is a fast-moving target. So you might be running a new JRE, and you get this popup:

java version warning

To stop this message, edit the downloaded dcmclient.jnlp file. Search for “versions”

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    <property name="jnlp.dcm.java.util.Arrays.useLegacyMergeSort" value="true"/>
    <property name="jnlp.dcm.supported.java.versions" value="1.7.0_79,1.7.0_80,1.8.0_45"/>
    <property name="jnlp.dcm.dcm.jmsuser.name" value="jmsuser"/>

Add your current JRE version:

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    <property name="jnlp.dcm.supported.java.versions" value="1.7.0_79,1.7.0_80,1.8.0_45,1.8.0_51"/>

This will stop that popup. Note that this gets over-written if you download a new dcmclient.jnlp file, and/or upgrade BNA.