Month: May 2020

Running 40Gb QSFP+ on Dell’s S5048-ON Switches

Subtitle: Remember kids, read the documentation

Recently at work, we upgraded the top-of-rack switches in our datacenter from Dell S4810 to Dell S5048F-ON. The process was supposed to be simple. Both switches ran Dell Networking OS 9 (a rebrand of Force10), and we mirrored to port, port-channel, and VLAN configurations exactly.

Things went well for 2 hours of the process. All the 1/10Gb DACs and fiber transceivers moved to the S5048 switches and worked with no problem. The problem we ran into centered around the 40Gb transceivers. We used QSFP+ SR units from Dell and assumed they be plug and play in the S5048’s 100Gb QSFP28 ports. Surprise, they didn’t. Well, they did, but we had to make a config change. After an hour of troubleshooting, we discovered the command we needed, AND it was well documented. If only we had read the manual…

https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/us/en/04/networking-s5048f-on/s5048f-on-9.14.2.6-config-pub/splitting-100g-ports?guid=guid-60943ca1-cbf8-4958-aa54-4e8d00e331b2&lang=en-us

If you are going to use 40Gb QSFP transceivers or DACs on Dell’s S5048 switches be sure to run the following command

stack-unit <stack unit number> port <port number> portmode single speed 40g

Have fun.
-Tony

Adobe Inserting Ads in Android

Adobe appears to be taking a page from the Microsoft playbook. Recently I went open a photo on my Android phone and was prompted to choose a default app. In the list was an option I hadn’t seen before, “Photoshop Express (Install).” Where did this come from? It turns out the choice came from Adobe Acrobat Reader. I was using Acrobat Reader with PDFs from work. A recent update to the apps must have slid this “feature” onto the phone. Opening the Share menu from an image also showed “Adobe Scan (Install)”.

In 2019, if you remember, Microsoft did the very same thing sparking a lot of backlash. Let’s hope Adobe gets the message and removes this quickly.

I have Acrobat Reader version 20.3.0.12688 installed for reference.

Have fun.
-Tony

Website Reboot

Hello there and welcome back. As you can see, it has been a very long time since I touched Look Another Blog. All the common factors applied as to why: lack of motivation, lack of content, life, death, etc. But, I’m back and planning to devote more time to the site so the web crawlers to ingest. Maybe a human will visit now and then.


This isn’t a spur of the moment idea either. In September 2019 I attended DerbyCon, an Information Security conference. One of the talks I sat through was by Jason Blanchard called “How to Give the Gift That Keeps on Giving – Your Knowledge”. Jason gave simple ideas on how to get your knowledge out there and I recommend anybody whose afraid to write blog posts or upload YouTube videos go watch the session at https://youtu.be/Xnf8y9u-wh4 (the audio is a messed up, but bear with it).


For the past 8 months I’ve slowly, very slowly, been working on ideas I could write up and share on Look Another Blog. I’ve got 20ish posts planned out with more to come. Some of the posts will be simple stuff like I’ve written about in the past, while others will be technical as they are things I’ve done in my professional life.


So, sit back, strap in, and let’s see where this ride takes us.


Have fun.
Tony