Programmers, coding boards, switches, NICs and other hardware
How do you break a 100G QSFP28 port on a FortiGate 1800F, 4200F or 4400F into four 25G subports with a QSFP28-to-4xSFP28 passive DAC, and why do the subports come up at the wrong speed?
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…
A Chelsio CC2-S320E-SR (110-1114-30) dual-port SFP+ card recognised by TrueNAS would not link to a Dell PowerConnect 6224 through a QSFPTEK 0.5 m passive DAC: no link lights and status: no carrier, even after assigning IPs to cxgb0/cxgb1. Looping the DAC between two switch ports worked, and looping…
On an inexpensive firewall appliance (Intel Atom C3758R, six 1GbE igc ports and two SFP+ cages wired to the CPU) OPNsense showed four ix interfaces instead of two and the SFP+ ports stayed red/down with a copper SFP+ RJ45 module, although the link LEDs lit. ifconfig -v identified ix0/ix1 as the…
Replacing an old Dell switch with an Extreme 5420M-24, the same SFP module that had worked in the Dell would not bring the network up: the uplink port was active with rising TX counters but RX stayed at zero, no DHCP address, no ping to the firewall, and a new SFP+ module behaved the same. Ethernet…
A FortiGate 500E displayed the message This port is using a third-party transceiver on an SFP+ port; the poster asked whta it meant and which SFP+ specification to use. There were no errors or link problems, only the log line, so the real question was whether it signals a fault, degrades support…
Monitoring reported packet loss toward an ESXi iSCSI host; on the Dell S4810 (FTOS 9.11(2.6)) the interface TenGigabitEthernet 0/37 showed the warning Non-qualified pluggable media present, SFP+ type is 10GBASE-CU2M because a non-Dell DAC was used. The link was up with normal traffic (about 16…
On Zyxel XGS4600 switches, 10G and 1G SFP+ transceivers (including an FS.com DWDM-SFP10G-80) intermittently stopped transmitting; only removing and reinserting the module restored the link. Transceiver statistics at that moment showed TX power -inf dBm, voltage at the 3.00 V low alarm and TX bias…
A T2600G-28TS (TL-SG3424) uplinked over fibre to another building using D-Link transceivers and media converters showed the SFP port UP and transmitting but never receiving packets. Restart, factory reset and other SFP ports were tried. Another user returned the switch after failing to link it to…
Cisco-compatible CWDM SFP modules that had worked in Dell PowerConnect 6024 and 6224 switches produced a transmit failure error in a PowerConnect 8024F, presumably because the 8024F ports are SFP+. The poster considered Finisar FWLF1524P2Vxx modules but wanted confirmation from someone with a…
After a complete power loss a Dell R740 with a four-port Broadcom NDC (2x SFP+, 2x 1GbE) booted normally but the fibre SFP+ modules stayed unpowered and disconnected; a reboot did not help and only physically removing and reinserting the modules restored them. Dell support pointed at drivers and…
Between VxRail Dell S5212F-ON TOR switches and Cisco C9500-48Y4C switches, FS.com SFP28 DACs behaved inconsistently: a 5 m cable custom-coded Cisco on one end and Dell on the other came Line Up, Protocol down; a 2 m Cisco/Cisco-coded cable linked; a 3 m cable would not link even with the 2 m…
A short no-name DAC between a UDM SE and a Minisforum MS-01 had worked for months; a new 30 m Ubiquiti UACC-AOC-SFP10-30M active optical cable was recognised by the UDM SE (vendor, part, serial, temperrature, power visible) but no link came up and the SFP port log showed an SFP EEPROM error; on…
The poster wanted to connect a UDM SE (10G SFP+) to an Enterprise XG 24 switch (25G SFP28) and asked whether an SFP+ DAC would work with the SFP28 port falling back to 10G, or whether an SFP28 DAC was preferable. The concern was whether the SFP28 cage would fall back to 10G with an ordinary SFP+…
A UDM Pro (port 11 set to 1G) and a US-16-150W (port 17) connected by a 1 m Ubiquiti DAC (UDC-1) did not talk: the switch showed a link light, the UDM Pro showed nothing. Setting both sides to 1G and rebooting both devices did not help; reversing the cable and removing the parallel copper uplink…
An ADDON JD097C-AO SFP+ DAC worked between two US-48-500W (firmware 3.3.11.3850) but not from a US-48-500W to a US-16-XG (3.7.39.6089): no link lights on either side and forcing 10G made no difference, although mca-dump on the XG showed the module fully parsed (sfpfound true, vendor ADDON, part…
