Enabling ports on MT47396 switches

Infrastructure & Networking Software And Drivers
1

I need to enable a couple of ports on switches of this type:

vendid=0x2c9

devid=0xb924

sysimgguid=0x800690000004207

switchguid=0x800690000004206(800690000004206)

Switch 24 “S-0800690000004206” # “MT47396 Infiniscale-III Mellanox Technologies” base port 0 lid 19 lmc 0

It is the fabric in an SGI ICE8200, and I need to enable ports connecting two switches for the same fabric in one enclosure. The ports were set to disabled as the previous installation used external switches to interconnect them. I have used scripts on the nodes to do this, but this is unsatisfactory, buggy and complex. It involves starting opensm on the nodes to activate the ports at all (otherwise they’re cut off from the proper opensm and inactive), which messes with the running opensm. The hardware was donated to my university and I have no management software, support or the like. I have tried to use mlxconfig on these, but all I get is:

mlxconfig -d SW_MT47396_r1i0sw0_lid-0x0013,mthca0,1 q

FATAL - Can’t find device id.

-E- Failed to identify the device

Questions:

  1. Are these switches supported at all, or am I missing something in my installation?

  2. If the switches are unknown to my installation, is there a way to disable the checking of device IDs (like the --with_unknown option to mst)?

  3. What method can I use to set the ports to “enabled” permanently? As far as I was able to find out this apparently involves writing a modified firmware image to the switches’ EEPROM. If so:

  4. How can I obtain a proper image for this? Is there a way to dump the image from the switches (with the current configuration), modify the port config and re-upload it?

2

Hello Horror,

Thank you for posting your inquiry on the NVIDIA Networking Community.

Based on the information provided, unfortunately this switch model and technology is EOL and EOS for a long time.

The only publicly available information we have regarding to this product, you can review through the following link → Updating Firmware for a Single InfiniScale III / InfiniScale Switch System

Thank you and regards,

~NVIDIA Networking Technical Support

3

Bedankt, Martijn. That actually helps a lot, just having the firmware and config file may suffice. I’m aware that the product is out of support, but in general, is there any way to dump or otherwise view the current configuration of a switch? What utility would be used for this? I would like to use a configuration file that most closely matches the current config of the switches.

Thanks again,

Cheers

Horror