[j-nsp] MX304 Port Layout

[Litterick, Jeff (BIT)]

No, that is not quite right.  We have 2 chassis of MX304 in Production today and 1 spare all with Redundant REs   You do not need all the ports filled in a port group.   I know since we mixed in some 40G and 40G is ONLY supported on the bottom row of ports so we have a mix and had to break stuff out leaving empty ports because of that limitation, and it is running just fine.    But you do have to be careful which type of optics get plugged into which ports.  IE Port 0/2 vs Port 1/3 in a grouping if you are not using 100G optics.

The big issue we ran into is if you have redundant REs then there is a super bad bug that after 6 hours (1 of our 3 would lock up after reboot quickly and the other 2 would take a very long time) to 8 days will lock the entire chassis up solid where we had to pull the REs physical out to reboot them.     It is fixed now, but they had to manually poke new firmware into the ASICs on each RE when they were in a half-powered state,  Was a very complex procedure with tech support and the MX304 engineering team.  It took about 3 hours to do all 3 MX304s  one RE at a time.   We have not seen an update with this built-in yet.  (We just did this back at the end of April)


-----Original Message-----
From: juniper-nsp <juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net> On Behalf Of Thomas Bellman via juniper-nsp
Sent: Thursday, June 8, 2023 2:09 PM
To: juniper-nsp <juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net>
Subject: Re: [EXT] [j-nsp] MX304 Port Layout

On 2023-06-08 17:18, Kevin Shymkiw via juniper-nsp wrote:

> Along with this - I would suggest looking at Port Checker ( 
> https://apps.juniper.net/home/port-checker/index.html ) to make sure 
> your port combinations are valid.

The port checker claims an interresting "feature": if you have anything in port 3, then *all* the other ports in that port group must also be occupied.  So if you use all those four ports for e.g. 100GE, everything is fine, but if you then want to stop using either of ports 0, 1 or 2, the configuration becomes invalid...

(And similarly for ports 5, 8 and 14 in their respective groups.)

I hope that's a bug in the port checker, not actual behaviour by the MX304...


--
Thomas Bellman,  National Supercomputer Centre,  Linköping Univ., Sweden "We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand  the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!"