Programmers, coding boards, switches, NICs and other hardware
We are handing a 100G circuit off to a core router through a leased optical transport system, and the port on our side refuses to come up. The same pair of modules links instantly on the bench, which is what makes this so irritating. Wedge100BF-32X (wedge100bf32x) running SONiC InnoLight…
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 do industrial installs, mostly Hirschmann switches in cabinets nobody wants to open twice. On the last couple of projects the optics were the line item that hurt: the switches expect Hirschmann-coded modules, and the original M-SFP parts cost several times an equivalent generic module, with lead…
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…
We are wiring an FPGA capture card into an existing server and I am stuck at the very first step: the port simply never comes up. The setup: Mellanox MCX414-GCAT (ConnectX-4 EN, QSFP28, 50GbE capable) in the host FS Q-8LCA020 breakout AOC, QSFP+ on one end, eight LC ends on the other FPGA card on…
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…
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…
A good half of my work is putting one company's optics into another company's switch, so I spend a lot of time asking a module what it thinks it is. My toolbox for that is currently one command deep, and I would like to know what else is worth putting on the bench machine. Linux boxes with SFP+ and…
Small office, we are dropping the ISP-supplied box and terminating the fibre straight on the router. The handoff is AON, the provider only asks for a VLAN tag, no PPPoE and no ONT registration. What is in the rack: TP-Link ER7412-M2 V1, firmware 1.0.1, fibre into port 11 (SFP WAN) a TP-Link…
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…
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…
On a Mellanox SN2410 (MLNX-OS 3.6.4112) a 100G port connected to a Chelsio adapter through a 2 m unequalised QSFP copper cable would not link when FEC was disabled; no HSS lane signal was detected on the adapter side. The poster required FEC-off operaation and asked whether the switch supports it…
I look after a two-building site and the access switches were replaced with Aruba 2540s a while back. The fibre between the buildings has not been touched, but since the swap the uplink refuses to come up. Aruba 2540 on our side, ports 51 and 52 used for the uplinks Aruba J4858D 1000SX in the 2540…
Mellanox-branded Q-4S28AO03 3 m QSFP28 AOC 1x4 breakout cables (100G with FEC) that worked under Onyx 3.9.1908 stopped linking after an upgrade to Onyx 3.10.x. The ports reported Cable speed not enabled and, with auto speed, Negotiation failure; supported speeds showed 1G/10G/25G but the actual…
