Latest questions from the community.
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…
A FreeNAS build on a Supermicro X11SPM-TPF board would not recognise a Ubiquiti UF-RJ45-10G SFP+ copper module in the on-board SFP+ cage, although the switch side showed link. The poster asked for BIOS settings or a compatible 10G RJ45 transceiver. Hardware involved: Supermicro X11SPM-TPF, Intel…
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…
I run a ZTE ZXA10 C320 at a site, 10G uplink. I check levels and status by hand from the console, but I'd like to bring it all into monitoring so I don't have to jump into the CLI for every subscriber complaint. OLT: ZTE ZXA10 C320 uplink: SFP+ in xgei1/21/1 subscribers on gpon-onu1/1/1:1 and…
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…
Intel X520 (82599) cards enforce a list of approved SFP+ modules; under Linux the ixgbe parameter helps, but on Windows or ESXi there is no such option. The gist provides a Python script that reads the card EEPROM with ethtool -e and sets bit 0 of the byte at offset 0x58 (0 = Intel modules only, 1…
The storage box went from Core 13.0-U6.7 to SCALE 24.04 and then on to 24.10, and ever since one port is crawling while its twin on the same card is perfectly happy. The 25G card behaves the same way, which is what makes me doubt my own eyes. Intel X520-DA2 with Intel multimode SFP+ optics, 10G to…
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…
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…
