Programmers, coding boards, switches, NICs and other hardware
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 run a pair of FortiGate 101F units for a 40-person office, nothing exotic. port17 carries an SFP uplink to the core switch, port19 is an RJ45 run to the server room, both of them inside the shared RJ45/SFP block (ports 17-20). In the maintenance window last month we took the pair up to FortiOS…
One physical server on our ERS 8600 talks to nothing, and the switch is quite convinced everything is fine. The port has been in this state since the server was moved from copper to fibre. Avaya ERS 8600, server on a 1G SFP port in slot 3, port 12 server NIC with its own SFP, fibre patch through…
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…
The poster tried a Mellanox MFA2P10-Axxx 25G SFP28 AOC between a MikroTik switch and a Supermicro server with an Intel X722 (ixl driver) under pfSense. The cable linked fine switch-to-switch but on the X722 ifconfig -vvvm showed the module recognised (10GBase-SFI, 1000Base-KX listed) yet no carrier…
Bringing up a pair of GPU boxes against our existing 400G fabric, and I have already managed to buy the wrong cable once, so I would rather get the theory straight before ordering again. NIC: ConnectX-7 MCX715105AS-WEAT, single 400G port, OSFP cage Switch: 400G QSFP-DD ports In hand: a passive 400G…
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…
I do small batches of module recoding for integrators, and until now everything on my bench has been SFP-shaped: read the 256 bytes at A0h with the serial ID in the first half, read A2h for the diagnostics and thresholds, write the identification block, done. A customer has now turned up with 100G…
Running a small virtualization setup: two Proxmox 6 nodes and a target on FreeNAS 11.2. While the HBAs were connected to the target directly, everything ran for months without a single error. Put a used Brocade 200e between them to avoid crossing cables, and that's when it started. two Proxmox 6…
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…
We are lighting a handful of channels over one metro pair with passive mux and demux at both ends, 100 GHz plan. Everything I can actually source is fixed-wavelength DWDM SFP+, a separate part number per channel, and keeping spares that way is getting silly. 10G aggregation at both ends, SFP+ cages…
I am wiring per-port optical telemetry into monitoring for a couple of Nexus 9000 fabrics. Collection runs through NAPALM, and the getter I lean on is getoptics(). Nexus 9000 leaf and spine pairs QSFP-100G-CWDM4 modules on the fabric links NAPALM with the nxosssh driver, SSH transport, no NX-API…
Joining two buildings over a Nortel pair that has been in place longer than I have. The plan was simply to light the existing house fibre between the two switches and be done with it, but port 23 will not come up on either end. Two Nortel ERS 5510-24T, software 4.0.2.02 1000SX SFP GBICs, one in…
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…
My fibre WAN runs into a Turris Omnia and I moved from the ISP box to an XPON stick to drop one hop. The stick is a 2.5G part, the Omnia cage does 2.5G, and everything still lands at 1G. Turris Omnia, Turris OS 7.0.2 HBS, kernel 5.15.148 Luleey LL-XS2510 XPON SFP, RTL960x based, DFP-34X-2C2 family…
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…
Coming from ordinary office switching, so treat this as a beginner question on the industrial side. I am replacing a long copper run between two panels with fiber on a pair of Stratix 5700 switches and I have never used the SFP slots on these. What I have: two Stratix 5700 switches, one per panel…
We had a 200 m OM4 backbone pulled between two buildings a while back and I am trying to light it with kit we already own. Both ends are 2530s, both modules are the HPE part, and the link simply will not come up. 2x Aruba 2530-48G 2x J4858C 1000SX, port 51 on each side roughly 200 m of freshly…
Our inventory tooling walks every switch and records vendor, part number and serial for each pluggable straight out of the SONiC CLI. It works everywhere except one batch of QSFP-DD modules, where the identity fields come back mangled and the asset database fills up with junk. Switch: SONiC…
On an HP 5820-24XG-SFP+ (JC102A) the ports cabled with genuine HP X240 10G SFP+ 3 m DACs (JD097C) came up but logged OPTMOD/4/FIBERSFPMODULENOWINVALID: This is not a supported transceiver for this platform, and broadcast/multicast counters on those ports grew faster than normal. The cable is lisetd…
I swapped the ISP ONU for an ODI DFP-34X-2C2 GPON stick in my Turris Omnia so the fibre terminates in the router instead of another box on the shelf. That part worked: the line is registered, traffic flows, no complaints. The problem is the rate. It never goes above 1Gbps, and 2.5G was the whole…
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…
Field turn-up work on SDH circuits, and the tester has been fighting me on the optical side lately. Same kit that has been fine for years, so before I book a service call I want a sanity check on the order I should be working through. Viavi T-BERD/MTS-5800 with the SFP port populated, generic…
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…
We hand over industrial cabinets with the customer's own monitoring on top, so readable DDMI on the uplink ports is part of the acceptance list. On an RGS200-12P the two ports that matter refuse to print anything at all after DDMI is enabled, even though both links are up and forwarding. Zyxel…
At home I've got Rostelecom fiber with the carrier's ONT installed, and I'd like to get the extra box out of the cabinet: plug an SFP ONU straight into the router and distribute it myself from there. I bought the stick, but I can't get past the first step. Keenetic Giga router, SFP port free Eltex…
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 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…
We run a small regional network and pulled a spare 7050T out of stock to use as a DWDM aggregation box. Arista-coded DWDM optics for it quote close to the price of the switch, so we bought third-party DWDM SFP+ instead, and now the switch will not talk to them. Arista 7050T, EOS 4.10.6 generic…
