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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

You don't need two fans to keep a 10gig switch cool. Trick is to be careful with which RJ45 to SFP+ transceivers you buy - they come in hot and not so hot flavour. The ones I've got run at ~60C without any cooling whatsoever.

Tricky bit is the labelling on these tend to be rather rubbish esp on aliexpress so hard to tell what the chipset inside is or what the wattage is.

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Wiitek is a brand with the lower wattage ones that run around 60°C, not sure if they are on AliExpress, but they are on amazon.ca and worked perfectly in my Mikrotik. To OP and other readers, if getting into switches with transceivers be aware that many enterprise networking gear vendors vendor lock their ports and transceivers. That was an expensive lesson for me. There are third parties selling off-brand transceivers for a lot cheaper than the branded ones (fs.com is probably the biggest and best known). This can get complicated if you have different manufacturers and need different coded transceivers or even DACs with different "brands" on each end.

It’s an entire new world of weird things; I have some “ancient” Nortel PoE gigabit switches with 10G uplinks that I was able to find who the actual OEM was, and then find a firmware that could be massaged on.

Yeah those ones. - Broadcom chipset I believe. I did end up finding much cheaper non Wittek branded ones too on aliexpress but bought a couple different so can’t confidently share link. Think the key was looking for the ones marked Broadcom and 80m?

> vendor lock

That’s one advantage of aliexpress- it’s all unlocked

The modules/transceivers are unlocked there, but the switch ports may not be. Mikrotik doesn't vendor lock their ports, but the bigger manufacturers do. Some places sell transceiver programmers, but those are locked to their own modules (I think that may be due to a technical limitation). So fs.com's modules can be reprogrammed with FS.com's fiber box thing, and ubiquiti's modules can be reprogrammed with their Ubiquiti Fiber Wizard (I think that's the name of it?).

My switch has vendor locked ports, and there's a console command to disable the lock, but I'd have to beg the manufacturer for an unlock key (it's based on the switch's serial I believe) for a key, and it's a used switch, and they are not a fan of people using their OS on used switches since their license entitlements are non-transferable. So it's FS for me, and if my next used switch is a different brand I'll have to shell out for their reprogrammer.

The aliexpress 8 port managed 10gig switches are like 120 bucks now.

I just don't see the point in playing along with the vendor's games anymore - licenses, locked ports, even sceptical of ubiquiti after their ill fated attempt to force cloud accounts.

That said I can understand that not everyone is keen on mystery hardware

For my own 10G homelab network I jumped the gun and got a couple of Intel X540-T1 cards for my two servers and balked at the cost of the RJ45-SFP+ transceivers (Unifi's version is ~USD60). (I'm sure there are cheaper options for the "not hot" flavour transceivers but I didn't want to have to gamble again.)

In the end I just replaced each X540-T1 with a X520-DA2 which are pretty much the same price on eBay (under USD20) and then I can just use a DAC that's a fraction of the cost of the RJ45-SFP+ transceivers.

Yeah its better to avoid rj45 entire for 10gig if one can. It's unavoidable though for some places. e.g. A lot of consumer boards have a spare X1 PCIE slot...which is enough for 10gig if its gen4.

...but all the 1X cards I've seen are rj45 and didn't want to take a chance on seeing if a X4 sfp card can run in a 1X at full 10gig

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