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Ehh this chonker doesn’t look very surreptitious. I can only think of one other device that sticks out even further in front of the switch. Said device is a very old SFP+ to 10G 100m copper module with a huge heatsink and an external power brick!

That aside, I could imagine a gov’t agency programming these things and forcing ISPs to put them on customer ports. No need to wait for a maintenance window or free up rack space.

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This is one reason why I am a big proponent of network engineers physically visiting their equipment periodically. In large networks that may never happen, data center techs (often not even your own employees) are the only ones who ever see the racks in person.

Even if the 3rd party tech notices something unusual about the optic the certainly aren't going to touch it without a ticket and will probably not even mention it.

This is the one they sell publicly to anyone at a relatively affordable price.

If they make ones that run cooler and look the same as a normal optic, they might not be so forthcoming about it.

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