Vendor locks, unsupported module errors, matching modules to switches, NICs and routers
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…
