Is there a way to simulate a malfunctioning device or a faulty cable in a FC SAN network?
edit: I know shutting down a port on a switch is an option, I'd like to simulate high error rates though.
In an ethernet network it would be a simple case of adding a transparent bridge that discards a given percent of the packets, but I have absolutely no idea how to tackle that in an Fibre Channel environment...
Obviously you can manually shut off a port to simulate a faulty cable - or remove it obviously but I've been dealing with FC for years and never come across any form of 'frame discarder'. Maybe ask on a more FC-specific site perhaps?
Just about the only time you'll see FC errors on a port is if there's something wrong with the wire or the HBA. ISL errors can be caused by configuration issues, but you'd have to know how to break them to see that, as the defaults for all currently supported firmware levels on Brocade are going to be safe. That said, aside from buying a testing device designed to sit in the path between FC ports, you really don't have many options.
If you update your question to explain what you're really trying to do, I can edit this to better answer you.