Programmers, coding boards, switches, NICs and other hardware
An HPE FlexFabric 5950 48SFP28 8QSFP28 (JH402A) always downgrades an HPE JH419A 100G QSFP28 LC SWDM4 transceiver to 40G and never brings it up at full speed. Why?
An M290 with the optional two-port fibre module was fitted; can ports A0 and A1 be used as ordinary interfaces, for example for an ISP fibre handoff, and can a 1 Gb SFP be used in them?
What do the port states in the switchshow output of a Brocade Fibre Channel director or switch mean, and which of them point at the transceiver rather than the fabric?
A UCS 6332 fabric interconnect has only 40G QSFP+ ports, but the upstream switches are 10G. How can the FI be uplinked at 10G, and why does the breakout option not appear on some ports?
With auto-negotiation off and 10G configured on sfp1/sfp2 of a CCR1036-12G-4S (RouterOS 6.43.8), MikroTik S+DA0001 and Amphenol DACs still run at 1G and the Cisco side shows no link at 10G. Which part of this link should be checked first?
FS Box V2 is a firmware/coding tool kit for optical transceivers and DAC/AOC cables. It reprograms a module's compatibility code so it is accepted by a target switch platform, letting engineers adjust coding in the field or when a switch is upgraded to a version that no longer accepts the old code…
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…
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…
On a Banana Pi BPI-R4 running OpenWRT 24.10.0 an SFP module failed with kernel logs failed to read EEPROM: -ENXIO and warnings that the module was slow to respond. The internet still worked but the log filled with the error, and the poster was unsure whether it pointed to a faulty stick, a GPON…
On an Accton Wedge100BF-32x the ONLP call onlpsfpeepromread returned QSFP EEPROM data with alternating bytes skipped, so vendor strings appeared with every other symbol missing; the same transceiver read correctly on an Accton AS7312-54x. The vendor name FINISAR CORP appeared at the wrong offset…
Adapter boards that, with a serial programmer, read and write transceiver memory across SFP, SFP+, SFP28, SFP112, QSFP/QSFP+/QSFP28, SFP-DD, QSFP-DD, XFP and OSFP. The software covers the MSA/CMIS memory maps, manages host/manufacturer passwords including brute-force search, changes…
A user guide for an SNR SFP/SFP+ reprogramming solution: USB programmer plus Windows/Linux software (FTDI drivers required) supporting SFP and SFP+ per INF-8053, SFF-8472/8431, INF-8077i and INF-8438. The workflow is connect, read the module to display vendor/model/wavelength, load a new firmware…
A USB coding-board product line to reprogram optical transceivers so they match different equipment vendors. Supported form factors span GBIC, SFP, SFP+, SFP28, XFP, QSFP, QSFP28, QSFP-DD plus RJ45, DAC and AOC. The software reads, decodes, edits and writes module memory, ships about 400 well-known…
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…
On an Alta Labs Route 10 the SFP+ ports recognised FS.com SFP-H10GB-CU2M and 10Gtek CAB-10GSFP-P2M DACs (which had worked on MikroTik CRS devices) but no link came up against a MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+; forcing 1G baseT full gave a 1 Gbps link only. Staff requested diagnostics and ethtool -I output…
