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Comment by sekh60 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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