[c-nsp] Catalyst 2970 and third-party SFPs

[Tony Farinholt]

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote,   

>They do not have any cisco labels at all? I ask this because there are 
>quite a lot of optics that still bear the label of its manufacturer as 
>well as the vendor of the switch equipment who OEMed it.
>
>Also, there are 3rd party cisco coded SFPs out there, I guess the cisco 
>CRC algorith leaked or was reverse engineered so others could do cisco 
>compatible SFP optics.

Words of warning: some of those 3rd party cisco coded (OEM) SFPs
are simply copies of cisco parts.  The entire contents of the A0 and A2 flash
pages in the SFP are copied from a genuine cisco part to generic Finisar or
some other brand SFP.  Some of you may have noticed there is a cisco 
error-disable message when a single switch sees duplicate SFPs (same SNs,
security codes, etc.).  Folks like fluxlightinc.com have both OEM and real
cisco parts but the cisco ones are so close in price I wouldn't risk using the OEMs.

-tony