[f-nsp] Dying GIG-Ports on jetcore bigirons

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 03:58:17PM +0200, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
> Hello colleagues,
> 
> >From time to time Gigabit-Fiber-Ports on our old
> BI8GMR-Jetcore-Managementmodules are dying. In most cases they're starting
> to cause crc-errors which can be seen as rx-errors on the devices connected
> to them. Other ports are completely dead and don't bring up any link at all.
> 
> I have heard that this is "normal" because the lasers on those modules are
> so old and are reaching their end of life. Is there a cheap way to replace
> them?
> 
> What about the B8GMR3-Modules: are they affected too? I'm thinking about
> replacing the B8GMRs with B8GMR3s because they are cheap on the grey market
> - but this would only make sense if they're not affected.

Boy are they ever. I have dozens of B8GMR3 and B8G cards with dead ports 
a-plenty, some with 6 7 or even all 8 ports completely unusable. There is 
a reason those cards are so cheap on the grey market, and that is that no 
one wants to gamble on them. Even if everything checks out today, they can 
start failing one by one tomorrow, and in 6 months you can have a card 
with no working ports.

Foundry seems to have one of the worst problems in this area by far, 
primarily with certain brands of optics used in early production runs (I 
used to know which, but I've honestly stopped caring). Other versions of 
the same cards can still run forever, but you never know what you're going 
to get. If you really care and you can work a soldering iron, it's cheap 
and easy to replace those 1x9 transceivers, but personally this stopped 
being worth my time compared to buying new systems with 6x the density a 
long time ago. :)

If you really must keep using (or at least doing new deployments of) those 
things, do yourself a favor and buy cards with modular optics like M4s and 
BxGs for a few bucks more.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)