Programmers, coding boards, switches, NICs and other hardware
I look after a small pool of FreeBSD boxes and I am adding 10G to one of them. The card went in, the machine boots fine, but the OS refuses to make an interface out of it. Server on FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-p1, stock GENERIC kernel QLogic FastLinQ QL41112 dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapter SFP+ optics in…
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…
We run a pair of ThinkSystem NE1032 RackSwitch units as top of rack in a small colo cage. The Lenovo-branded optics we inherited only cover half the ports, so the rest got filled with generic SFP+ modules and a couple of short DACs out of the same batch we already use on other vendors' switches…
I look after a mixed Zyxel estate on one site and I am putting together a vrey basic optical health check for the fibre uplinks: temperature and Rx power per port, so I can see a link degrading before the users report it. What is involved: Zyxel GS1910, older access switch with SFP uplinks Zyxel…
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…
We are adding capacity to a small FC fabric and bought compatible 16G short-wave SFP+ from an optics supplier instead of paying the switch vendor price. The switch refuses them. Brocade G610, Fabric OS 9.x generic-coded 16G SWL SFP+, correct wavelength and reach according to the label Brocade-coded…
Second hand HPE 5130 for the rack at home, and it arrived with four HPE JD092B X130 10G SFP+ SR modules in the box. I bought new OM4 LC patch cords, wired one SFP+ port to the 10G card in the server, and got absolutely nothing. HPE FlexNetwork 5130 24G PoE+ 4SFP+ EI (JG936A) 4x HPE JD092B X130 10G…
I run a Turris Omnia NG at home and the last thing sitting on the metallic WAN port is a two metre hop to the ISP router. I would like to move that hop into the SFP+ cage and free the copper port for the lab side. The official Turris SFP+ copper module (RTROM01-RTSF-10G) costs about what a small…
Building a storage box at home and picked up a dual 10GbE Solarflare SFN7122F (SFC9120) because it was cheap. The card itself looks healthy, the system sees it and both ports enumerate, but not one of my existing multimode SFP+ modules will bring up a link in it. Solarflare SFN7122F, dual port…
We recode a small batch of modules for customer hosts most months, nothing exotic: read the original page, write the vendor string the host wants, put the module in the switch and move on. One module out of the current batch refuses every write while reading back perfectly, and before I bin it I…
We hand customer circuits off on MRV OptiSwitch demarcation boxes - mostly OS906, with a few OS904 and OS912 left on older builds. When a ticket comes in about a circuit that is down or flapping, I want two things over SSH before anyone drives out: what module is actually sitting in the port…
We run packet capture on a handful of Napatech cards and I am putting together the optics order for the next rack. Before spending anything I want to understand what the qualified module list actually means in practice, because the wording leaves room for interpretation. Napatech NT40E3 and NT20E3…
A FreeNAS box with on-board Intel X552 SFP+ ports (Xeon D) and an ESXi 6.7 host with a Mellanox ConnectX-3 (MT27500, Dell Y3KKR) were cabled with two Mellanox MCP2104-X003B passive DACs from 2014. Looping each device to itself brought the ports up, but between the two systems ESXi showed…
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…
We took over a pair of ZS3-2 controllers together with the shelves behind them, and I am the one who has to order optics before they go back into service. The controller service manual is very short on this point: it lists the NIC and HBA options, and for the 10GbE SFP+ card it names exactly two…
