Recent content by dmather

It's fun to play around with, but the equipment is somewhat obscure outside of large enterprises and therefore doesn't really retain value. Of course that means for a home lab you could get some pretty nice storage equipment for relatively cheap.

Those are FibreChannel HBAs. They won't work for standard ethernet networking because they are made for FibreChannel storage networks. When searching for network adapters make sure to search for NIC or ethernet. Sometimes people shorten ethernet NICs to 1gbe or 10gbe to differentiate since there...

I use a patch panel for home/home lab, but then I have a fair number of fixed in-wall runs and plans to add more. If you don't have any fixed in-wall wiring then no, there's no point. If you only have a couple then as Evan mentions a small keystone style patch panel is the best because then it's...

Basically the idea is that longer fixed (not moving) runs of wire use solid core wire as klui mentioned. These wires have more material and so have better signal propagation over long distances but are brittle because thicker solid copper wires work harder as they are flexed. So data receptacles...

Well to anyone like me who was planning on messing around with FC and FCoE, you need a NOS version between 5 and 7.2. NOS 5 is the first version that supports the dual personality ports and they removed support for FC entirely in NOS 7.3.

Is anyone familiar with setting on FibreChannel on a VDX6740 switch? Mine is on a really old firmware NOS 4.0.1 as I have no way of getting a new firmware. It doesn't even seem to think there's FC ports on the switch when I try and configure them.

Yeah, it looks like the SFP I was using doesn't support 1gb mode.

I have an ICX6610 with no 10gb ports on the front licensed and I've got a 10gb SFP+ installed in the first slot, I don't see any activity on it even though I'd expect that it should be able to fall back to 1gb speeds. Is this expected when there's no 10gb licenses or is this probably an SFP+...