Mellanox cards with core 13

[acp]

We have a number of members who have run fiber out to a garage, outbuilding, or antenna/wifi/satellite mast and have grounding concerns that fiber is very good at working around. It isn't always length.

It's the best lightning proofing you can do. :)

 

[jgreco]

It's the best lightning proofing you can do. :)

No, being buried twenty feet underground in your concrete doomsday bunker with a big arse Faraday cage is. Everybody's got one of these, ready for the electronocalypse, right?

 

[rvassar]

ConnectX-2 - Good, runs everywhere. Twinax & fiber.
ConnectX-3 - Bad. Only runs on Windows. Likely needs a firmware update involving some kind of ritual sacrifice.
SolarFlare - Good so far. Fiber / Linux only.

I like fiber for the lightning separation. Living in Texas, I have great, yet unrealized plans for having my Zoneminder node be a couple km away from the gate.

 

[da_da]

At home 10G's should be TwinAX/DAC or AOC cables, as they are less prone to child or other home-thing-a-ma-jig damage for at least servers in this instance for NAS box... I do have a IXsystems TrueNAS box and shocked that it came with 10G copper card.

 

[jgreco]

SolarFlare - Good so far. Fiber / Linux only.

SolarFlare works under FreeBSD and I recommend as a less-expensive option in the 10G Networking Primer.

At home 10G's should be TwinAX/DAC or AOC cables,

Strongly disagree. They are nonrecyclable as use cases change, whereas using the correct vendor coded optics mean that you can order a fiber of virtually ANY length as needs change, and which can also be patched through patch panels, wall jacks, etc., while being absolutely vendor agnostic We're trying to focus on beginner friendly stuff here. If you want to use DAC/AOC that's fine, but it would suck if you ran into gear that required vendor locked ones (and yes these absolutely do exist). But suit yourself. I prefer to be able to hit up the local Graybar or MicroCenter when I'm out in the field and I'm in need of a 10M OM3. Getting ahold of a 10M AOC same day is incredibly difficult in most cases, especially with vendor coding. 10Gbase-SR, no problem.

 

[Constantin]

No, being buried twenty feet underground in your concrete doomsday bunker with a big arse Faraday cage is. Everybody's got one of these, ready for the electronocalypse, right?

Just a Ufer foundation and a few lightning rods on the roof go a very long way. Long vertical interconnects in lightning-prone areas should be either fiber or far from the outside walls to avoid induced currents during a lightning strike.

How prone your home is to a strike will depend on location, climate, etc. In our case, three big trees had their crowns reduced to matchsticks. So all the stuff here running from the outside to the inside is fiber at least part of the way.

 

[jgreco]

Just a Ufer foundation and a few lightning rods on the roof go a very long way. Long vertical interconnects in lightning-prone areas should be either fiber or far from the outside walls to avoid induced currents during a lightning strike.

Will it stop the zombies, though? Maybe worrying about bunker buster bombs is a bit excessive, but a nice old Titan II missile silo would be an epic evil lair...

 

[Dice]

ConnectX-3 - Bad. Only runs on Windows. Likely needs a firmware update involving some kind of ritual sacrifice.

Strongly disagree.
If you're looking at FC firmware SKUs, there will be some adjustments to do adapt to a non FC application.
Look at what you buy. The ConnectX-3 is not the problem.

 

[jgreco]

Strongly disagree.
If you're looking at FC firmware SKUs, there will be some adjustments to do adapt to a non FC application.
Look at what you buy. The ConnectX-3 is not the problem.

Sure it is. One major reason these cards are not recommended is because there's a bunch of things you need to be aware of, such as the multiple firmware personalities, and this makes them a bad choice for beginners in the 10G arena. That, combined with the fact that there are other cards available at similar price points, make the CX-3 a problematic card. Now if you have one, and you like them, that's fine. It's not that they cannot be MADE to work, it's that they often don't work out of the box, and when they do they also have some quirks.

 

[danb35]

I have CX-2 cards in a couple of my Proxmox hosts. They weren't my first or even second choice, but they were the only thing I could lay my hands on that would do (i.e., could be forced to do) 10GbE and fit in the mezzanine slots in my Dell C6220 II server. But getting them to do Ethernet rather than Infiniband took a good bit of doing, and I'm not sure I could have done it under TrueNAS (given that it regenerates everything in /etc/ on boot).

 

[Etorix]

If you want to use DAC/AOC that's fine, but it would suck if you ran into gear that required vendor locked ones (and yes these absolutely do exist).

Thanks for the very useful document in this link.