Turn off checking of SFP coding?

[paulgear]

Hi folks,

I thought i remembered seeing a command to do this in a previous forum post, but i can't seem to locate it.  Is it possible to manually disable enforcement of the SFP coding check on 5120-EI switches?

[Peter_Debruyne]

Hi Paul,

If I remember well they just complain about the SFP coding (message like "unsupported xxx") but it should still work.

Have you encountered SFPs which actually did not come online ?

If so, which model/firmware/branding(h3c/hp) ?

Best regards,Peter

[paulgear]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the follow-up.  Yes, i'm actually seeing SFPs that will not come online.  I'm trying to use an Allied Telesis AT-SPEX 1310nm SFP module in a 5120-EI and when it is inserted i receive these log messages:

Jul  1 18:50:35 10.120.1.190 2013 hp5120 %%10ENTITY/1/PHONY ENTITY(t):   Trap 1.3.6.1.4.1.25506.2.6.2.0.11: Entity ID is 105, entity extend ID is 105, entity name is GigabitEthernet1/0/28, admin status is 4, alarm light status is 0
Jul  1 18:50:35 10.120.1.190 2013 hp5120 %%10OPTMOD/4/FIBER_SFPMODULE_NOWINVALID(l):   GigabitEthernet1/0/28: This is not a supported transceiver for this platform. HP does not guarantee the normal operation or maintenance of unsupported transceivers. Please review the platform datasheet on the HP web site or contact your HP sales rep for a list of supported transceivers.

I've logged a request with support, but so far no response.  Web searches for the first message seem to indicate that H3C have started enforcing SFP encoding, which is disappointing.  However all the hits discussing it were in Chinese, so i might be mistaken on this.

[Richard Litchfield]

H3C enforce the H3C vendor ID for optics/DACs in the H3C (Chinese) firmware only. If you have the HP firmware (and you should, unless you are in China), the vendor ID is not enforced.

Try this to stop the nag:

transceiver phoney alarm disable

 Reference

[A year or so ago, one of the H3C Chinese firmware images ended up on the HP website, and that caused all manner of confusion and upset when people upgraded! It was replaced with the correct HP image pretty quickly, but you occasionally come across it still. IIRC, the firmware I saw was for 58xx.]

[paulgear]

Thanks Richard - good to know.  It appears there's no transceiver command on 5120s.

Support's response boiled down to: not supported

So why the SFP modules never came online might have to remain a mystery.  :-\

[internalnews]

Strange, I setup my first 3Com 2928/2952 (==  H3C S5120-SI) switches in 2008/2009 and received the latest firmware releases for these in those days within H3C forum (http://forum.h3c.com) and never had any problems with non-3Com SFP codings. I also did a file comparison between firmware from H3C´s and HP´s homepages nowadays. There was no difference (no single bit)

[manuel.bitzi]

Hi paul

I had some old 3com transceivers which wouldn't come up on the nowadays CW5 switches. But on older CW3 switches they work. Transceivers are really old, out of sales since years.

The transceiver phony command would be intresting. But I didn't found it on 5120, 5500 nor 5820.

br

Manuel

[RyanBiddle]

I'm having the same problem.

Used these same cables on some Cisco Gear (Between UCS Fabric Interconnects and 5108 IOM FEX modules) with no problems.

When I ran these from my Nexus9K to a pair of 5500s I got these same syslog messages you posted on the HP side.

Port shows down.

no link light.

at someones suggestion I tried sutting doen the interfaces and undo'ing the shutdown.

no change.

I believe they were Startech cables.

My rep is swapping them out for Axiom, which should supposedly work. we'll see...

[RyanBiddle]

Oh, and HP wants almost $800 for a SFP+ to XFP DAC Cable. WTF!

[Apachez-]

And then your cisco device will start to complain instead =)

Best option for interoperability is to simply use regular SFP+ optics, that is multimode or singlemode (personally I prefer singlemode, this way I wont have to care about WHICH multimode fiber it is and its length).

Using DACs should rather be seen as a cheaper option to interconnect two devices of the same model (and in same cases same vendor).