Popular discussions about programming, compatibility and testing of optical transceivers.
We are pushing Wi-Fi into an outbuilding on a campus site. The only fibre going that way is a single strand, so the plan was to hang an AP-375 out there and feed it over a BiDi pair we already had on the shelf. Aruba AP-375, ArubaOS 8 Cisco BiDi SFP in the AP cage, its matching partner wavelength…
The poster has a stack of two Cisco Catalyst 3850-48T switches, each fitted with a 2x1G/2x10G fiber uplink network module. Two 10G fiber links already run in slots 2/1/3 and 2/1/4. When a single-mode 1G SFP is inserted into 1G slot 2/1/1, the switch reports the module as unsupported and places the…
Small office, one Firebox M470 on the perimeter, and I wanted to move the link to the core switch off copper and onto the built-in SFP+ ports. Bought a pair of generic SFP+ modules for it, one for each end. The switch side lights up straight away, the Firebox side never does. Kit: WatchGuard…
We run a three-node cluster with the nodes cabled directly to each other over 100G DAC, no switch in the path, and the interfaces put into a broadcast bond so replication traffic has its own fabric. Before I put real load on it I wanted a baseline, and the numbers do not agree with each other. 3x…
On an HPE 5510 24G SFP 4SFP+ HI (JH149A, Comware 7.1.045 R1111P01) genuien JD119B and JD118B 1G SFPs were accepted at first (OPTMOD/4/MODULEIN: The transceiver is 1000BASESXSFP), but after a cold power reboot the same modules were reported as UNKNOWNSFPPLUS with OPTMOD/5/CHKSUMERR: Transceiver…
The poster, validating their product against Cisco Nexus 9000 switches (a Nexus C9332D-GX2B chassis), is blocked by bug CSCwo18785: configuring 200G on a QSFP-200G DAC fails with 'ERROR: The transceiver doesn't support this speed'. The cable is a Mellanox MCP1650-H002E26 200GbE DAC; connected…
A MikroTik CCR1036-8G-2S+ with S-31DLC20D 1.25G single-mode SFPs reported link OK but no traffic flowed; TX power was blank and RX was -9 dBm. The identical module on the same fibre worked in a CCR1036-12G-4S. Port disable/enable, forcing 1G full duplex on both ends and support tickets did not…
The poster had third-party SFP+ optics for both the on-board Intel X553 ports of a Netgate XG-7100 and an add-in X520-DA2 and had found that hw.ixgbe.unsupportedsfp=1 in /boot/loader.conf enables them. Questions: does it apply to both on-board and PCIe Intel ports, what is the difference between…
A pfSense router on a Supermicro R210 II with an AOC-STGN-i2S (82599-based X520 clone) was connected throguh an FS.com SFP+-to-RJ45 module to a cable modem with a 2.5 Gbps port. No link negotiation happened; pfSense offered only auto and 10G speeds and never 2.5G. Hardware involved: Supermicro…
Two Cisco Catalyst 3750-X switches (WS-C3750X-24P-L and WS-C3750X-48P-L) run identical code. A Cisco GLC-SX-MMD is detected normlly in Gi1/1/1 of the first switch, but the second switch reports 'media type is Not Present' with 'link type is force-up' on Gi1/1/1, and 'show idprom interface Gi 1/1/1'…
Replacing the ISP ONU with a Baudcom DB-1234-SFM GPON SFP stick in a hEX S: the stick registered with the OLT and obtained an IP with the spoofed MAC, but with sfp1 as WAN pings returned network unreachable, although the same configuration on ether1 (behind the ISP ONU) worked and Winbox showed no…
Two FS.com 1G BiDi SFPs (1490/1310 and 1310/1490 nm) in a MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+ running SwOS 2.9 detected incoming light around -6 dBm but never established a link; the same optics linked on a Netgear switch. The poster asked whether a manual speed setting was needed and whether RouterOS would…
The thread starter had a set of Cisco EEPROM images (SX, LH, ZX types) but no CWDM images and wanted CWDM SFP modules to show up on Cisco switches as CWDM/WDM optics rather than being misidentified as SX or LX. Without a correct image the switch either reported the module as unsupported or forced…
On Huawei switches with 25GE ports the poster asked about using SFP+ transceivers and copper cables; per the troubleshooting docs, when a non-1 m copper cable is connected to a 25GE interface the RS-FEC function must be enabled or the interface goes Down, and mixing different optical modulles at…
We are building out two racks and the switching is settled: a pair of M4500-48XF8C as the leaves with M4350 underneath. What is not settled is the optics BOM. NETGEAR does not put its own label on 25G or 100G modules, and I would rather not discover after delivery that the SFP28 ports dislike what…
We are reusing a pile of 10G optics on a whitebox switch running SONiC, so a few QSFP28 cages are fitted with QSA-style adapters (10GTek QSA-100A) carrying plain 10G SFP+ modules. Mechanically and electrically this is fine. The management side is where it falls apart. switch: 1U whitebox, SONiC…
Some Cotsworks SFF fibre modules ship with invalid data in the first EEPROM bytes (physical ID, extended physical ID, connector type) and with checksums programmed before the fields were finalised, so the Linux phy/sfp driveer does not detect them as valid modules. A kernel fixup rewrites the three…
The poster's newly acquired Cisco Catalyst 9300 (with an 8-port 10G SFP+ network module) would not link to a Cisco Catalyst 4503-E tat only has 1G SFP ports. Suspecting a 10G-versus-1G speed mismatch, the poster tried to force the 9300's 10G SFP to operate at 1G with the 'speed' command, but the…
For a deployment on Dell PowerEdge R630 and C4140 servers the poster had Intel X520-SR2 adapters (E10G42BFSR) fitted with the bundled Intel FTLX8571D3BCV-I3 10GBASE-SR SFP+ modules (850 nm, 300 m multimode). The uplink switch is a Huawei Quidway 9300 whose SFP+ ports carry 10GBASE-LR (1310 nm)…
We are refreshing the core of a small office and put in a pair of Aruba CX 6200F. The link between the two switches is meant to be a 10G trunk on the SFP+ uplinks, and I cannot get either box to admit that 10G exists on that port. 2x Aruba CX 6200F Switch Series, trunk on port 1/1/25 Cisco…
We recode a small batch of modules for customer hosts most months, nothing exotic: read the original page, write the vendor string the host wants, put the module in the switch and move on. One module out of the current batch refuses every write while reading back perfectly, and before I bin it I…
I keep a shelf of pulled SFPs at home and I would like to be able to read their EEPROM, repair a module whose checksum got mangled, and occasionally recode one for a switch that is picky about vendor strings. Buying a commercial programmer for a handful of modules a year makes no sense here, so I…
An Aruba/HPE 2530-48G-2SFP+ on firmware 16.01.0012 logged Port contains a transceiver not made by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the advice to use onlly genuine transceivers, and refused the modules; ironically one of the rejected transceivers was HP-branded. The poster asked whether a command…
A MikroTik CSS610-8P-2S+ (SwOS Lite) needed to connect its SFP+ ports to a Cisco Nexus 5596UP. The ports showed the transceivers in the web UI but no link, after trying several fibre cables and transceivers. The switch web UI listed vendor and type for each module, yet the port stayed at no-link…
On an Intel S2600WFT board the X722 10GbE SFP+ controller (rev 09, NVM 3.31 0x80000d31 1.1767.0) refused ethtool -m with Cannot get module EEPROM information: Invalid argument, and the kernel logged Module EEPROM memory read not supported. Please update the NVM image. The behaviour was identical…
Four HP ProCurve 6120XG blade switches (516733-B21) refused J9150A 10G SR SFP+ transceivers that the datasheet lists as supported; show tech transceivers reported them as unsupported. The switches ran Z.14.56. The poster asked whether a firmware upgrade or a configuration setting was needed…
An ODI DFP-34X-2C2 GPON ONU SFP failed to advertise its 2500BASE-X capability because its EEPROM (or virtual EEPROM) did not provide correct speed information to the Linux sfp driver, so the interface did not run at the expected rate. A kernel patch adds a quirk to force the right speed. Hardware…
We took over a pair of ZS3-2 controllers together with the shelves behind them, and I am the one who has to order optics before they go back into service. The controller service manual is very short on this point: it lists the NIC and HBA options, and for the 10GbE SFP+ card it names exactly two…
SFP+ DACs linked MikroTik-to-MikroTik and OLT-to-OLT, but between a V-SOL EPON OLT 16008D and a CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS or CRS326-24G-2S+RM the OLT reported the interface as disconnected. The same DACs were recognised on both platforms, so the poster suspected a cross-vendor auto-negotiation or…
The poster runs a Cisco Nexus 5000 with an N2K-C2232PP-10GE fabric extender. Three FEX-facing ports report 'sfp validation failed' with Cisco FET-10G modules. Following advice found online, the module was removed, the port speed set to 1000 and the module reinserted; the port was also shut/no shut…
A QSFP112 400G SR4 module in a ConnectX-7 (MCX755106AC-HEAT) with an MPO-12 Type-B cable showed module state Ready and data path DPActivated, but mlxlink --showmodule reported State = Disable, Supported Cable Speed = 0x00000000, Compliance = Unspecified/Undefined, Power Class 1.5 W (too low for…
After moving a Bell fibre connection from an ER-X to an ER-4 with the ISP's Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia GPON SFP (3FE46541AA / G-010S-P) plugged directly into eth3, the WAN dropped every 3 to 60 minutes; syslog had hundreds of kernel: Failed to read SFP EEPROM1 at byte 0 val -6!! entries and SFP module…
A DS14-MK4 shelf came my way for almost nothing and I would like to hang it off an ordinary tower server as bulk storage at home. It is fully populated with its original carriers, it powers up, fans spin, front panel looks alive - but I cannot get a single disk to appear on the host. NetApp…
The poster wanted to use a QSFP+ 40G-to-4x10G breakout cable on a two-port Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro (MT27520, firmware 2.42.5044, PSID HP1370110017, MLNX OFED 4.6 on Debian 9.6) so each 10G leg could connect to a different switch, similar to what an Intel XL710 offers. SR-IOV virtual functions had…
A Cisco Nexus 5672UP fitted with a 10GBASE-SR SFP+ could not connect to another switch that uses a 1000BASE-SX (1 Gbps) transceiver; both ends are multimode optics. When the poster changed the port speed, 'show interface brief' displayed an 'SFP checksum error', and swapping the Nexus optic for a 1…
Before deployment the poster asked for a certified or tested SFP28 DAC to connect an HPE FlexFabric 5950 with an SFP28 card to a dual-port Mellanox MCX4121A-ACAT (ConnectX-4 Lx), and for any documentation of that pairing. Hardware involved: HPE FlexFabric 5950, Mellanox MCX4121A-ACAT, SFP28 DAC…
A dual-port ConnectX-5 (MT27800, firmware 16.35.1012, MLNXOFED 5.8 on BC-Linux 8.2) connected to a switch with a DAC would not recover after the cable had been connected and disconnected about fifteen times: the port stayed in State: Polling with Physical state ETHANFSMABILITYDETECT, and mlxlink…
Four HP A5500-HI switches in an IRF stack logged unsupported transceiver messages for six rear-module (JD368B) ports that were cabled with HP J9281B SFP+ DACs to ProLiant Gen8 servers with 530SFP+ NICs. display transceiver interface shwed Transceiver Type STACKSFPPLUS, Connector COPPER, Vendor Name…
Across about forty ProCurve/Aruba switches the poster had used J4858C and J4858D 1G SX SFPs without issues, but eight newly purchased J4858D units logged Unsupported Transceiver on 2530-8G (J9774A, YA.15.16.0006), 2530-8G (J9777A, YA.15.12.0007) and 2530-24G (J9776A, YA.15.10.0003). show tech…
Small office, one leased line, and the carrier terminated it on an ADVA FSP150CP screwed to the wall of the comms cupboard. My job is to get our own router onto that circuit instead of renting one from them, so the ix0 SFP+ port of a Netgate XG-7100 goes straight ino the ADVA access port. Netgate…
We are adding capacity to a small FC fabric and bought compatible 16G short-wave SFP+ from an optics supplier instead of paying the switch vendor price. The switch refuses them. Brocade G610, Fabric OS 9.x generic-coded 16G SWL SFP+, correct wavelength and reach according to the label Brocade-coded…
We are adding a G610 to an existing fabric and there is a box of non-Brocade 16G/32G FC SFP+ left over from another build. Before I plan any ports around them I put one into a spare port on the bench to see what the switch makes of it. Brocade G610, Gen 6 third-party 32G FC SFP+, no Brocade…
Moving a pair of hypervisors onto Fibre Channel storage, and one host refuses to present a single LUN while the very same hardware works when the card is handed to a VM. QLogic QLE2692, ISP2722-based 16/32Gb FC, both ports cabled Fujitsu Eternus DX100 S5 at the other end Proxmox VE 6.2 host…
I run a ZTE ZXA10 C320 at a site, 10G uplink. I check levels and status by hand from the console, but I'd like to bring it all into monitoring so I don't have to jump into the CLI for every subscriber complaint. OLT: ZTE ZXA10 C320 uplink: SFP+ in xgei1/21/1 subscribers on gpon-onu1/1/1:1 and…
A TP-Link T1700G-28TQ (V3, firmware 3.0.0) with a TL-SM311LM module was linked to a Netgear ProSafe GS716T with a SkyLane SFP85P55GE0B989 module. The TP-Link port showed 1000M with a flashing LED while the Netgear port stayed down, and throughput was about 1 Mbps; with a media converter the link…
On an IOS XR router (RSP-based ASR 9000 class, observed on IOS XR 4.x and 5.x), the poster configured a tunable DWDM XFP with 'controller dwdm 0/1/0/0', 'admin-state maintenance', 'wavelength 55', 'admin-state in-service' and then brought the TenGigE interface up. The running configuration shows…
A Python library to create, read and modify the 256-byte A0h page of SFP EEPROM per SFF-8472. It exposes named fields (vendor, part, serial, wavelength, bit rate, encoding, link lengths, diagnostics options), generates images from scratch or from a binary, and validates/recalculates checkssums. It…
A DGX Spark with a ConnectX-7 NIC was connected to an existing 10G SFP+ optical network through an inexpensive QSFP-to-SFP+ adapter bought on AliExpress; neither DACs nor standard optical modules produced any link. The poster asked whether the setup could work at all and how to configure it…
The poster needed to connect stacked Aruba 6300F (JL665A) switches to a 6300M core (JL658A) at 10 Gbps over more than 3 m. J9283D 3 m DACs worked for short runs and the older 3810/2930 platforms supported a 7 m J9285D cable, but that cable is not listed for the 6300. The question was whether the 5…
The poster owned a MikroTik RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT (hAP ac) with a single SFP cage and had two spare 850 nm modules on hand: a Cisco-branded AFBR-57F5PZ-CS1 and an Intel-branded FTLX8571D3BCVIT1. The ISP delivered the service over a single fibre strand rather than a duplex pair, and the posster wanted…
