Experience with suppliers, third-party modules, warranty and pricing
The poster had free thrid-party SFP/SFP+ samples that worked on Extreme switches and asked whether to buy genuine or third-party modules. A respondent reported that on a new X620 a third-party SFP+ linked but its DDMI data could not be read, and that Extreme provides no help for problems involving…
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…
We run a couple of IBM Power boxes next to a small SAN, and I am trying to write down a sane spares policy before the next hardware maintenance renewal. The part I cannot pin down is the transceiver itself: on some adapters it looks like a field-replaceable part in its own right, on others a…
We are a small regional ISP rebuilding the optics budget for next year. Every 10G spare on our shelf is coded for exactly one platform, so the spares pool is roughly three times larger than our failure rate justifies. The idea on the table is to buy re-codable modules and code them ourselves as…
I am specifying a fibre ring for a customer's plant network and the switch choice is already fixed: Moxa EDS-518A. The BOM went out with generic 1G optics, because our stock room is full of them, and now the customer's own engineer insists that only Moxa-branded modules may be fitted. switches…
Speccing the uplinks for an M4300-96X before the order goes in, and the 40G side has turned into a dead end that I would like to sanity check with people who have actually built one. NETGEAR M4300-96X chassis APM402XL port card for the 40G QSFP+ ports planned: two 40GBASE-X runs to the neighbouring…
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…
On a Supermicro SYS-1019D-FRN8TP running VyOS 1.4 rolling the on-board Intel X722 (i40e) did not recognise an ISP-supplied 1310/1270 nm single-fibre SFP nor other spare optics; ethtool -m returned Cannot get module EEPROM information: Invalid argument. The poster asked how to apply the well-known…
On an Aruba 1930 (JL685A, software 2.6.0) two D-NET DN-SFP-LX modules in SFP+ ports 49 and 50 actually carried traffic, yet the web dashboard showed both ports as DOWN and, without a CLI, the poster could not check whether the modules were identified. The question was whether this was a bug, an…
The poster asked whether third-party optics can be used in an HPE FlexFabric 5700 40XG 2QSFP+ (JG896A) and whether the ProVision command allow-unsupported-transceiver exists on it. The answer clarified how Comware differs from ProVision: there is no allow-list of supported transceivers, so unlisted…
A FlexFabric 5900AF running Comware 7.1.035 R2208P01 reported a third-party transceiver as not supported when inserted, while the same class of modules worked in a FlexFabric 7904 on 7.1.045. The poster asked whether support could be enabled by command and whether the Comware versin mattered…
We pulled a pair of G8124E out of a decommissioned rack and I am rebuilding them as the aggregation layer for an internal test environment. Budget for branded optics is zero, so everything goes in with generic 10G SR modules of the type we already run elsewhere. Lenovo RackSwitch G8124E, ex-IBM…
An Aruba/HPE 2530-48G-2SFP+ on firmware 16.01.0012 logged Port contains a transceiver not made by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the advice to use onlly genuine transceivers, and refused the modules; ironically one of the rejected transceivers was HP-branded. The poster asked whether a command…
We are refreshing a pair of aggregation closets and the optics line is the part management keeps poking at. The switches are EXOS boxes and the plan was to fill the 40G uplinks with generic QSFP+ DACs, the same way we already do on the access ports. Then someone on the team dug up a note about a…
A network operator received QFX3500 switches that would not bring up thhird-party SFP+ transceivers even though a Juniper sales engineer had said they would work. JTAC stated that non-Juniper SFP+ optics would never be supported on the platform. The switch detected the presence of the module but…
In a NANOG discussion about vendor lock-in, an operator described two concrete failures. First, a third-party optic answered I2C reads too slowly; the switch vendor's polling code did not handle the timeout and crashed the linecard control plane, and the vendor refused to treat it as a bug because…
While staging an EX2300-48P and an EX2300-24P (both Junos 18.2R3-S5.3) with non-Juniper SFP+/SFP moules, the 48-port switch recognised the transceivers and created interfaces, but the 24-port switch showed nothing in any of its four uplink ports; show chassis hardware listed PIC 1 as 4x10G SFP/SFP+…
The poster, validating their product against Cisco Nexus 9000 switches (a Nexus C9332D-GX2B chassis), is blocked by bug CSCwo18785: configuring 200G on a QSFP-200G DAC fails with 'ERROR: The transceiver doesn't support this speed'. The cable is a Mellanox MCP1650-H002E26 200GbE DAC; connected…
The poster asked whether anyone had used third-party optcis in a Cisco Catalyst 9300 series switch running IOS XE Everest (16.x), and specifically whether the hidden global command 'service unsupported-transceiver', long used on older Catalyst platforms to accept non-Cisco SFPs, still functions on…
