Popular discussions about programming, compatibility and testing of optical transceivers.
Homelab, nothing exotic. An Odroid H2 does routing duty on its 2.5GbE ports, and I wanted to hang it off one of the 10GbE SFP+ cages of the switch through an RJ45 copper module instead of pulling fibre across the room. QNAP QSW-M408S, copper module in one of the 10GbE SFP+ cages Odroid H2 router…
Field turn-up work on SDH circuits, and the tester has been fighting me on the optical side lately. Same kit that has been fine for years, so before I book a service call I want a sanity check on the order I should be working through. Viavi T-BERD/MTS-5800 with the SFP port populated, generic…
Intel-branded servers witth a built-in ConnectX-3 (MT27500, ConnectX3-A1-WSP-QDR, firmware 2.36.5000, mlx4en 4.6, kernel 4.19.68) lost link when a QSFP-to-SFP+ adapter with an SFP+ transceiver replaced direct QSFP cabling: ethtool reported Link detected: no and speed Unknown!, port in ETH moe. The…
My firewall is a Supermicro E300-9A running pfSense Plus 22.05, and both 10G SFP+ ports refuse to come up. Neither ix2 nor ix3 ever shows carrier, whatever I put in the cage. Hardware: Supermicro E300-9A, pfSense Plus 22.05 Ubiquiti DAC-SFP10-0.5M and a 10Gtek passive twinax cable Supermicro…
A used IBM Emulex dual-port 10GbE SFP+ PCIe card (bent bracket, loose heatsink) made both TrueNAS Core and a Windows 10 PC hang for a long time during boot; the switch showed a link but neither OS saw the interface as active. Hardware involved: IBM Emulex dual-port 10GbE SFP+, Chelsio NICs, Intel…
I inherited a Sun Network 10GbE Switch 72p with a couple of legacy boxes hanging off it that will never do more than a gigabit. The plan was to drop a 1G capable module into one of the SFP+ cages and be done with it. Sun Network 10GbE Switch 72p, SEFOS CLI over the serial console x2129a dual-rate…
I run a small Proxmox box at home and wanted a proper 10G path to the storage node, so I dropped in a used Supermicro AOC-STGN-i1S. It is the plain Intel 82599 design, board marked E157872, and I assumed this would be the boring part of the build. It is not. Supermicro AOC-STGN-i1S, Intel X520-DA1…
Our inventory tooling walks every switch and records vendor, part number and serial for each pluggable straight out of the SONiC CLI. It works everywhere except one batch of QSFP-DD modules, where the identity fields come back mangled and the asset database fills up with junk. Switch: SONiC…
Small office rack: there is a 40G card in the file server and a switch with spare uplink ports, so instead of buying another box I tried to hang the server straight off the switch. Both ends see the cable, the link never comes up. Huawei S6730-H24X6C, QSFP28 uplink ports QNAP LAN-40G2SF-MLX in the…
Two Flex System enclosures, each with an EN4093R 10Gb Scalable Switch (option 49Y4270) as the network module. Ports come back error-disabled after a chassis power event, and less often drop into the same state while everything is running. It is not always the same ports, which is what makes this so…
The poster wanted to flash four TRW-1310-1.25C-3 and TRW-1550-1.25C-3 SFP modules to work with an HP v1910-24G (JE006A) and asked about a programmer. The difficulty was finding the right firmware and matching serial numbers within one switch while keeping checksums valid. Hardware involved: HP…
Building a storage box at home and picked up a dual 10GbE Solarflare SFN7122F (SFC9120) because it was cheap. The card itself looks healthy, the system sees it and both ports enumerate, but not one of my existing multimode SFP+ modules will bring up a link in it. Solarflare SFN7122F, dual port…
On a CRS226-24G-S2+RM (RouterOS 6.42.11 long-term) the SFP+ port stayed at no link, not running, slave after a power loss, while software reboots were fine; disabling and re-enabling the interface fixed it manually. The problematic module was a Huawei MA5671A GPON SFP, other SFPs behaved, and the…
I run a provider's network with a mixed fleet of modules, so I regularly have to prep modules for specific switches. I want to finally understand the mechanics of the check instead of guessing at dumps. What I'm working with: Cisco Catalyst 2960X-24PS-L, the pickiest one in the fleet QTECH…
We run a handful of 80 km DWDM spans off EX4200s with third-party optics on both ends, because the vendor-branded DWDM parts were never going to fit the budget. That was fine for years. After the EX boxes were moved to Junos 12.3 the optics still sit in the same ports and the spans still exist, but…
I run a Turris Omnia NG at home and the last thing sitting on the metallic WAN port is a two metre hop to the ISP router. I would like to move that hop into the SFP+ cage and free the copper port for the lab side. The official Turris SFP+ copper module (RTROM01-RTSF-10G) costs about what a small…
Bench work: re-coding a small batch of SFP+ modules so they carry the vendor string and part number the customer's kit expects. The edit itself is trivial in a hex editor, the write goes through, the read back matches byte for byte what I wrote - and the host still throws the module out. generic…
The poster wanted to use a MikroTik XS+DA0001 passive DAC between the 1G SFP port of an RB3011 and an SFP+ port of a CRS309 and asked whether a passive cable can bridge different SFP generations. The RB3011 SFP cage is 1G only while the CRS309 cage is SFP+ (10G), and a passive DAC has no active…
We pick up a 1GE carrier handoff on a Ciena 3930 and I am putting together a spares kit for it. The module quoted for that circuit is XCVR-A10Y31, a 1000BASE-LX/LC part: 1310 nm, 10 km single mode. Nothing exotic about it, and I have a drawer of generic optics with exactly that specification…
Replacing a customer's incumbent aggregation pair with CloudEngine kit, and the single link that refuses to come up is the 100GE feed into their packet broker. Everything else on the switch went in without drama. Huawei CloudEngine 6800, 100GE port 100GBASE-SR4 QSFP28 modules, Huawei parts, one at…
Reverse-engineering notes on the SFP Wizard: it reads a module's part number (page A0h bytes 40-55), looks it up in an embedded password database and sends the matching unlock password, falling back to brute force when unmatched. It traces the firmware evolution: v1.0.5 tried only the first…
A FortiGate 500E displayed the message This port is using a third-party transceiver on an SFP+ port; the poster asked whta it meant and which SFP+ specification to use. There were no errors or link problems, only the log line, so the real question was whether it signals a fault, degrades support…
Bringing up a pair of GPU boxes against our existing 400G fabric, and I have already managed to buy the wrong cable once, so I would rather get the theory straight before ordering again. NIC: ConnectX-7 MCX715105AS-WEAT, single 400G port, OSFP cage Switch: 400G QSFP-DD ports In hand: a passive 400G…
We run a couple of IBM Power boxes next to a small SAN, and I am trying to write down a sane spares policy before the next hardware maintenance renewal. The part I cannot pin down is the transceiver itself: on some adapters it looks like a field-replaceable part in its own right, on others a…
We run a pair of ThinkSystem NE1032 RackSwitch units as top of rack in a small colo cage. The Lenovo-branded optics we inherited only cover half the ports, so the rest got filled with generic SFP+ modules and a couple of short DACs out of the same batch we already use on other vendors' switches…
I picked up a couple of second-hand Arista switches for the lab and ran straight into the optics gate. Arista-coded modules link up, passive DAC cables link up, and anything third-party leaves the port down. The lab side: DCS-7150S-24, bought used, no support contract and no account team behind me…
After upgrading a CRS305-1G-4S+ to SwOS 2.12, SFP-GE-T 1000BASE-T copper SFPs stopped linking although the switch still identified them in the SFP tab; the same modules kept working on a CRS317-1G-16S+ with the same firmware. Modules inserted before the upgrade continued to work, modules inserted…
A set of bash scripts using i2c-tools to modify SFP module EEPROM. Hardware is an STM32 configured as a USB-I2C adapter (or a Raspberry Pi / mainboard SMBus) with a Cisco Twingig adapter as the SFP breakout. It handles the default Cisco Finisar module password 0x00000000 and recalculates checksums…
A user with a MikroTik GPON ONU SFP module in a RouterBOARD facing a FiberLink OLT saw the interface as registered but the module serial never appeared in the OLT for provisioning. The thread turned into a reliability report: an operator lost every deployed MikroTik GPON module within two months of…
We are bringing up a pair of AS9716-32D as a 400G spine in the lab, on a community SONiC image with the PDDF platform layer. The optics are not the problem, the peer links fine, but everything the switch says about them is wrong. Edgecore AS9716-32D (x8664-acctonas971632d-r0) community SONiC build…
