I've recently been experimenting with swapping out the Intel X520-DA2 with SolarFlare SFN5122 and I found out that for some reason the SolarFlare NIC seems to get stuck on M11SDV-4C-LN4F board during POST (more precisely, the POST hangs for a very long time at BIOS enumeration 94 step).
The only suggestion I've found was to take the CMOS battery out and reset the BIOS by shorting out a couple of leads on the MBO. I did that, it did reset the BIOS settings but that also didn't seem to help. The BIOS is fairly recent (vintage 2021) but not absolutely most recent one. There is also a WD SN550 NVMe drive plugged in together with one SATA SSD.
The reason I had tried to swap these out is that I'd like to remove the ISP router + CAT6 completely and just plug in the ISP's SFP ONT (which is a Nokia brand) but alas X520-DA2 works only with Intel-branded transcievers. That would cut out the unnecessary middle man, reduce the power consumption a bit and yield true FTTR (fibre-to-the-router) instead of FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). I recall from my past experiments that somehow I've been able to get the board to boot with SF NIC and that plugging it in directly worked well with pfSense.
Moving forward, the available options/questions I see are:
The only suggestion I've found was to take the CMOS battery out and reset the BIOS by shorting out a couple of leads on the MBO. I did that, it did reset the BIOS settings but that also didn't seem to help. The BIOS is fairly recent (vintage 2021) but not absolutely most recent one. There is also a WD SN550 NVMe drive plugged in together with one SATA SSD.
The reason I had tried to swap these out is that I'd like to remove the ISP router + CAT6 completely and just plug in the ISP's SFP ONT (which is a Nokia brand) but alas X520-DA2 works only with Intel-branded transcievers. That would cut out the unnecessary middle man, reduce the power consumption a bit and yield true FTTR (fibre-to-the-router) instead of FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). I recall from my past experiments that somehow I've been able to get the board to boot with SF NIC and that plugging it in directly worked well with pfSense.
Moving forward, the available options/questions I see are:
- has anyone gotten this NIC to work with Supermicro M11SDV?
- perhaps there is a BIOS setting/combination that results in POST getting stuck at BIOS enumeration step?
- is there another NIC with SFP+ that would be tolerant of transciever branding and that is know to work with M11SDV?
- I am fairly sure I can't buy another SFP ONT, have fs.com re-code as Intel and call it a day. I believe ISP's ONTs are coded with custom firmware specific to an ISP and the firmware signature has to match the expected one on the other end
- upgrade BIOS blindly to latest and hope for the best
- since this machine is the sole firewall for the house, that would be my last option
- I am also skeptical this would work; the NICs are 10 year-old obsolete hardware, chance of that getting a fix in an Epyc 3000? Looks like slim at best
