Brocade Web Tools Administrator's Guide (53-1000606-01, October 2007)

Web Tools Administrator’s Guide 13

53-1000606-01

Administrative domains

Logging out

You can end a Web Tools session either by logging out or by closing Switch Explorer window.

You might be logged out of a session involuntarily, without explicitly clicking the Logout button,

under the following conditions:

• A physical fabric administrator changes the contents of your currently selected Admin Domain.

• Your currently selected Admin Domain is removed or invalidated.

• Your currently selected Admin Domain is removed from your Admin Domain list.

• You initiate a firmware download from the Web Tools Switch Administration window. In this

case, you are logged out a few minutes later when the switch reboots.

• Your session times out.

Administrative domains

An “administrative domain” (Admin Domain or AD) is a logical grouping of fabric elements that

defines what switches, ports, and devices you can view and modify. An Admin Domain is a filtered

administrative view of the fabric. The logical view presented within an Admin Domain does not hide

fabrics, chassis, switches, and slots; however, the attributes of switch ports and end devices are

filtered based on Admin Domain membership.

Admin Domains permit access to a configured set of users. If a switch is part of an Admin Domain,

then when you log in with an account that has an administrator role, you can perform switch enable

and disable functions and all switch port-level functions such as port enable and port disable. You

cannot perform fabric-wide management, as switch membership within a zone does not provide

zoning rights on the switch ports.

NOTE

Do not confuse an Admin Domain with the domain ID of a switch. They are two different identifiers.

Admin Domains are identified by a numeric ID (0–255) and also by name. This name can be

autogenerated based on the ID (for example AD1 or AD5) or you can specify a more informative

name such as Accounting or Engineering.

AD0 is a special Admin Domain that contains all switches, ports, and devices that have not been

put into other Admin Domains. AD255, another special domain, is an unfiltered view of the entire

physical fabric.

NOTE

Some features work only in AD255 when user-defined domains are present, such as ACL

management.

By default, all fabric elements belong to AD0. In Fabric OS v5.2.0 and higher, a physical fabric

administrator with appropriate permissions can create up to 254 additional Admin Domains and

assign fabric resources to them (see Chapter 7, “Managing Administrative Domains”). Only users

who have been specifically assigned to those domains can view and modify the resources they

contain.