ebay dell mellanox dual 10gbe

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gzorn

Member
Jan 10, 2017
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Well, with some more tinkering, I was able to get SR-IOV working on the cross-flashed CX322. I'll probably hold on to this now. The only other problem that I found - the activity LED's seem to be screwed up by the cross-flash.

At some point, I'll post a report on some of the details of the cross-flash adventure.
Now to get my hands on a full height bracket.
 

abq

Active Member
May 23, 2015
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Let me know if you find a good source for full height brackets. I could use a few for various mellanox dual port cards.
 
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trumee

Member
Jan 31, 2016
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I dont know about the cards posted here, but the cheap Mellanox ConnectX EN(MT26448) gave me problems with LACP and vlans to a 10G switch. The host was running vanilla FreeBD-11.0. I replaced the Mellanox with a Solarflare SFC9020 to get around the problem. Perhaps, the driver has been improved in the later versions.
 

kiteboarder

Active Member
May 10, 2016
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Well, with some more tinkering, I was able to get SR-IOV working on the cross-flashed CX322. I'll probably hold on to this now. The only other problem that I found - the activity LED's seem to be screwed up by the cross-flash.

At some point, I'll post a report on some of the details of the cross-flash adventure.
Now to get my hands on a full height bracket.
Definitely would appreciate a cliff's notes version. I will be attempting this soon myself. Thanks in advance!
 
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gzorn

Member
Jan 10, 2017
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@kiteboarder My only advice is to make doubly sure that you will really benefit from the flash (get features that you don't have with current firmware). I'm not necessarily sure that I gained all that much flashing my card (possibly SR-IOV, but even that i'm not sure about).
Basically, I followed the instructions in: Flash OEM (IBM) Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN with stock firmware?
I did bridge the 'flash' holes on the card with a piece of copper wire.
Then I used mlxfwburn (I think) to update the firmware to the very latest (it also wiped the old UEFI firmware out).
It mostly 'just worked', but there are little weird behaviors (no SFP module reading, LED weirdness, flash may not be write protected - even with jumper not bridged, etc. No guarantees, YMMV.

For SR-IOV under linux (proxmox v5beta), I think the Mellanox drivers get loaded in the init ramdisk, so one can either 1. Change the initrd to include the appropriate options to force the SR-IOV virtual functions or 2. run: modprobe -r mlx4_en ; modprobe mlx4_en after booting (assuming that you've specified your SR-IOV options in /etc/modprobe.d/
At one time, I thought I got the BIOS on the card to force the SR-IOV settings automagically, but I cannot reproduce that now. I've just changed too many things on the test server.

Hope this helps.
 
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STHUserB

New Member
May 16, 2023
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Hi Bandit, (and others), have you had any experience using the CX322 with Windows 11? Were you able to configure VLANs with the card? It sounds like the cross-flash would not be needed for this use case. Thanks,
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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wanted to add to this there is official dell firmware for this card that is as new or newer than nvidia.
02.42.50.58 dated 24 Aug 2021
The oem versions are supported for much longer compared to the retail versions.
The connect-x 2 for example was relased in 2009/2010 and got the eol status by mellanox in 2015. The same adapters (as parts of whole systems) were supported by hp(e) (and probably other oems) until november 2020.
In that timespan the cx-3, 4 & 5 were released and 6 announced :D
 

bandit8623

Member
May 25, 2021
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Hi Bandit, (and others), have you had any experience using the CX322 with Windows 11? Were you able to configure VLANs with the card? It sounds like the cross-flash would not be needed for this use case. Thanks,
It should work. Although I'm now using a connectx4 card. Connect x3 are stuck on older winof driver stack. Not updated anymore. Connect x4 uses winof2

Personally I would find a connectx4 lx card.


 
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