Vendor locks, unsupported module errors, matching modules to switches, NICs and routers
A first-time SFP+ deployment between a UniFi 16XG switch and a Tehuti Networks TN9310 SFP+ adapter, with transceivers the reseller called compatible, produced an Rx fault indication in the UniFi controller. Swapping the fibre ends (polarity) did not help. Hardware involved: Ubiquiti US-16-XG…
FS.com 40 km 1550 nm SFP+ modules (item 11592) showed their information in a MikroTik CCR1016 but never linked in the SFP+ ports, whatever the auto-negotiation, 1G/10G speed or flow-control settings; standard 10G modules (item 29851) worked in the same ports, and the 40 km modules ran at 1G in…
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…
With two dual-port Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards, a MikroTik SFP+ switch, 1 m OM4 patches and mixed 10G/25G transceivers from several vendors, one NIC port showed link UP but got no DHCP and could not route, 25G transceivers negotiated only 1G, and previously stable 10G links dropped intermittently…
Home setup, everything in one rack. I want to connect the NAS to the switch faster than gigabit, but I don't want to run fiber: the distance is about five meters, a plain patch cord covers it. D-Link DGS-1250-28X switch, SFP+ ports free TerraMaster F4-424 Max NAS, copper RJ-45 port short Cat6a…
Small homelab, two second-hand switches and a drawer of optics collected over the years, most of which the hosts refuse because of the vendor code. Recoding has always been the blocker: a proper programmer sits around 369 USD, which is more than I paid for the switches, and the Ubiquiti SFP Wizard…
I want the ISP box out of the meter cupboard and the GPON line terminated straight on the router. It is a KPN-based line, fibre comes in on SC/APC, and the idea is to move the WAN from the Huawei ONT into the SFP+ cage of the UDM-Pro and keep exactly the VLAN 6 / PPPoE setup the ONT was running…
We are moving the office uplinks from copper to fibre and the quote that came back has DrayTek-branded optics in every line. Before I start arguing about the difference against ordinary 10G modules I would like to know whether the hardware actually cares what sits in the cage, because the…
I do small business installs, and this one is a fibre service handed off on an ADVA FSP 150-GE102Pro. The customer wants the WAN terminated on their own router instead of the carrier box, so it has to land in the SFP+ cage of a MikroTik RB4011iGS+. Nobody told me what fibre the service actually…
Standing up 25G uplinks from a QFX5120-48Y towards a second switch and a couple of new servers. Before I hand the segment over I want the link settings written down properly, and I cannot find where auto-negotiation lives on these ports. Juniper QFX5120-48Y 25G optics in the SFP28 cages et…
A site decommission left me with a drawer of pulled Cisco optics, a mix of GBICs, 1G SFPs and 10G SFP+, and I have to decide which of them go back into production and which go in the bin. The GBICs I have put aside for now, since nothing on the bench takes them, so everything below is about the SFP…
A Mellanox ConnectX-3 40GbE NIC connected with Mellanox QSFP passive copper cables (MC2210126-005) to a Dell PowerConnect 8164 (firmware 5.1.4.5) produced a link-up event for a few seconds followed by a permanent link-down. The same cables worked NIC-to-NIC, and Dell refused support because the…
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…
All 10G ports on a Netgear M5300-28G3 were used, so the poster asked whether a Cisco 3 m SFP+ DAC (H10GB-CU3M) or Finisar FTLX8571D3BCL 10G SR modules could be used in the switch's 1G SFP ports to add another 10G-capable device at reduced speed. Hardware involved: Netgear M5300-28G3, Cisco…
A Dell-branded Intel X520-DA2 with Flypro 10GBASE-T SFP+ modules showed no carrier (or no interface at all) on Debian and on FreeBSD-based OPNsense because the card rejects unapproved modules. The post collects the per-OS fixes and the permanent EEPROM approach. Hardware involved: Dell-branded…
Homelab switch: a D-Link DGS-1210-28 revision F1 that I flashed with OpenWrt so I could stop fighting the stock web UI. Everything works except the last four ports, which are the copper/fibre combo ones. Switch: D-Link DGS-1210-28 rev F1 Firmware: OpenWrt 21.02.0-rc3 (r16172-2aba3e9784) Ports…
The poster bought a Cisco SFP-10G-SR on eBay (markings suggesting 2007 manufacture) and, warned about counterfeit Cisco optics with longevity and safety risks, asked how to tell whether it was genuine before deploying it. Hardware involved: Cisco SFP-10G-SR. Reported symptoms/messages: authenticity…
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…
I run a backup storage system in a data center. A pair of DD9900 in HA, network ports on the NDC QLogic. After a reboot or reseating the module, port ethMa stops seeing the transceiver, and it's not a one-off - it's a stable, repeating pattern. Dell DD9900, DD OS 7.2.0.95, HA configuration NDC…
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 SRX1500 sit in separate data centres a few kilometres apart, joined by dark fiber pairs we own end to end. They have to come up as a chassis cluster, which means the control link has to cross that fiber instead of a patch cord inside one rack. The setup: two Juniper SRX1500, identical hardware…
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…
We run a pair of racks that hand off to a carrier-facing Cisco NCS, and one of the 100G server uplinks has never come up since the build. Same result after moving the server to another cabinet with a different patch panel, so I have stopped treating it as a one-off. Supermicro server…
New ESXi host going into a rack that hangs off a campus 3850. Management on copper came up without drama, the 10G uplinks did not: as soon as the server boots, the switch port drops into err-disable and the host sees nothing on that vmnic. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650, 7X06CTO1WW, with an Emulex VFA5.2…
Home setup, and I am trying to get rid of the ISP router on a Cosmote GPON line. The idea is to run the fibre straight into the UDM-Pro and let the stick do the ONU job, but the provider only accepts the session if the 12-character serial and the device model string of the old CPE are presented, so…
Small tower site: an RB4011 in a ventilated roadside cabinet feeding a couple of radios, with one 10GBASE-T copper hop over to the switch because there was already cable in the duct. The port drops out on warm afternoons and comes back at night, which points fairly clearly at the module rather than…
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…
Moving my home FTTH line off the operator's ONT and onto a GPON stick in my own router, so that the fibre lands straight in the rack and I keep one box instead of two. The stick is recognised, the port comes up, and then nothing comes back. MikroTik CRS328-24P-4S+, stick in sfp-sfpplus1…
We push traffic from a lab server into a CRS518-16XS-2XQ over a 100G QSFP28 uplink, and it leaves the switch through a MikroTik S+RJ10 copper SFP+ into a plain 1G RJ45 host. The receiving side is missing a large share of the packets and I cannot pin it on anything obvious. Setup: MikroTik…
Running a CWDM ring at the access layer, Catalyst 3750 at aggregation. I got plain modules with no vendor encoding, case marking TTG965D1, 1470-1610 nm grid. The link comes up, traffic flows, but the switch treats them as SX modules: in both inventory and monitoring it shows SX instead of CWDM, so…
The poster wanted to connetc Aruba 2540 switches (JL357A, firmware YC.16.09.0001) to Cisco Catalyst 9300 switches using Cisco SFP-H10GB-CU3M DACs. After enabling allow-unsupported-transceiver the cables were still not recognised: show tech transceivers listed the port as unsupported, the LED…
We are standing up four DGX Spark nodes for disttributed training and hung them off a MikroTik CRS812-8DS-2DQ-2DDQ. The plan was one 400G QSFP-DD port on the switch feeding two nodes at 200G each, so a couple of breakout cables cover the whole cluster. MikroTik CRS812-8DS-2DQ-2DDQ, QSFP-DD ports…
Home rack, and the RB5009 has exactly one SFP+ cage. I wanted a second copper gigabit uplink out of it rather than pulling fibre across the room, so a copper module went in instead. MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN, RouterOS 7.1rc4 MikroTik S-RJ01 1000BASE-T copper SFP in sfp-sfpplus1 Cat6 patch, about three…
Rebuilding aggregation at one of our sites: a CRS326-24S+2Q+RM takes the custmer SFP+ ports and uplinks over 40G into a Huawei S6720. Short run inside the same rack, so a passive DAC rather than optics. MikroTik CRS326-24S+2Q+RM, QSFP+ port qsfpplus1-1 Huawei S6720-54C-EI-48S-AC, plain 40GE port…
Small home lab. I flashed a Linksys LGS328C over to OpenWrt SNAPSHOT to get away from the stock web interface. Everything survived the move except one SFP28 port that used to work perfectly well. switch: Linksys LGS328C (Realtek rtl930x), OpenWrt SNAPSHOT module: Dell S28-10G-25G-SR-85C, dual-rate…
We have a leased dark pair between two POPs, roughly 115 km, and both ends land on a Cisco Catalyst 6506. The requirement is modest: one gigabit, no DWDM, no channel plan, just a working point to point link. What came back when I asked Cisco how to build it from their own catalogue was an…
We took over a small aggregation site and one of the 10G uplinks has not come up since the module in it was swapped. The module is listed as incompatible with the CRS226, so that is where suspicion landed first, but the readings do not look like a rejected module to me. MikroTik CRS226 at the…
The poster tried to link an HPE FlexFabric 5900AF and a Dell S5212F-ON at 10 Gbps with DAC cables that had been custom-made with an HPE-coded end and a Dell-coded end. Both ports were forced to 10G full duplex, but no link came up. On the HPE side the interface reported Media type is stack wire…
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…
Servicing a small office network, two buildings linked by a single single-mode fiber that contractors pulled. The job was supposed to take half an hour: bring up a gigabit link between the switches in the two buildings. It's been two weeks and it still won't come up. What's installed: main…
On a Juniper EX4600 running Junos 14.1X53-D27.3 the poster inserted a non-certifiied 1G single-mode WDM (BiDi) SFP, 20 km, TX 1550 / RX 1310 nm with DDM, into ge-0/0/1. The interface never appeared: show interfaces returned error: device ge-0/0/1 not found, and the log recorded XCVR: Unit 1, Fibre…
A network operator received QFX3500 switches that would not bring up thhird-party SFP+ transceivers even though a Juniper sales engineer had said they would work. JTAC stated that non-Juniper SFP+ optics would never be supported on the platform. The switch detected the presence of the module but…
While staging an EX2300-48P and an EX2300-24P (both Junos 18.2R3-S5.3) with non-Juniper SFP+/SFP moules, the 48-port switch recognised the transceivers and created interfaces, but the 24-port switch showed nothing in any of its four uplink ports; show chassis hardware listed PIC 1 as 4x10G SFP/SFP+…
Juniper-branded SFP modules were intermittently reported as unsupported or not supported in the chassis hardware output right after an EX or MX device booted. Rebooting the device or reseating the SFP made the module recognised again, which was frustrating in production. The poster wanted to know…
The poster needed to connect a MikroTik CRS328-4C-20S-4S+RM to an HP 1820-24G-PoE+ over 200-500 m of outdoor aerial fibre and asked which SFP modules to buy and how to verify compatibility before purchase. The HP compatibility table listed only J4859C as a single-mode SFP, while MikroTik offered…
The poster wanted to run 100 Mbps fibre SFP modules in a D-Link DES-3200-28F but the vendor compatibility list only named older switches (DES-1228, DES-1252, DGS-3612G). The question was whether the list was simply stale or whether the modules would be rejected by the newer switch. A related…
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…
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…
The poster planned a server with an Intel X710-DA2 dual-port SFP+ NIC connected to two Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 48 Lite units, with LACP between the switches. Six 10G SFP+ modules were needed (two for the server side, four for the switches) and the question was which modules would be recognised by both…
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)…
