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…
