Unlocking CISCO devices to work with “unsupported” SFP
by tnk on Sep.21, 2008, under Cisco, Huawei, Networking
In cisco equipment there is one very irritating problem – it works only with “cisco” SFPs.
Well actually cisco is not manufacturing sfps so basically there is just some check going on inside the router/switch. It can drive you crazy if your only cisco sfp dies and you have nothing except for some normal 3rd party sfp (which is by cisco standard not compatible).
Well there is a way how to go around this. In ios command line write the following :
service unsupported-transceiver
and then
no errdisable detect cause gbic-invalid
This will cause that some stuff will come up your screen saying something along the lines that CISCO is not responsible for what you are doing and that you are doing it on your risk. (I do not remember if this happens after the first or second command). Anyway you can ignore this and your SFP will (most probably) run.
There are some cases that the sfp is not working properly but the odds are something like 100:1
As a side note Huawei equipment does not block any vendor’s sfp but has also list of supported modules which is rather to good idea to read because the “non-supported” sfps have usually some issues.
4 Comments for this entry
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March 8th, 2010 on 06:59
There is nothing clearly mentioned of how to unlock cisco device, the information you have provided seem to be not enough, can you expand your explanation.
March 8th, 2010 on 17:24
Hi the software unlock is done by those two commands mentioned above, the problem though is that the SFP does not have to be compatible i.e.: it will not properly register with the device or it will register but will not work anyway (I saw both variants multiple times with multiple SFPs).
Generally Cisco has this software lock for multiple good reasons
A) to avoid End users to complain about their no-name SFPs that are not manufactured to the desired standards
B) to avoid testing hundreds of SFP vendors and then solving the issues (usually because the vendor is just not able to follow proper specs)
C) to earn more money for their overpriced re-branded SFPs
So there are only two good options here
– either buy Cisco’s SFPs that will work always
– or try some decent brand which should work as well but is obviously not supported (I know that Agilent and Optech should work just fine).
If you decide otherwise and go for some cheap no-name brand you should be expecting some troubles…
April 4th, 2010 on 20:58
How to add this to my RSS reader? I’m sorry I am a novice :(
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