Force10 MXL Switch: Port Numbering

This is a quick cheat sheet fro MXL port numbering schema, which might seem a bit confusing if you see a MXL switch for the first time.

Above is the picture of the switches that I’ve worked with. On the right we have a 2-Port 40GbE built-in module. And then there’re two expansion slots – slot 0 in the middle and slot 1 on the left. Each module has 8 ports allocated to it. The reason being that you can have 2-Port 40-GbE QSFP+ modules in each of the slots, which can operate in 8x10GbE mode. You will need QSFP+ to 4xSFP+ breakout cables, but that’s not the most common scenario anyway.

As we have 8 ports per slot, it would look something like this:

This picture is more for switch stacking, but the rightmost section should give you a basic idea. One of the typical MXL configurations is when you have a built-in 40GbE module for stacking and one or two 4-Port SFP+ expansion modules in slots 0 and 1. In that case your port numbers will be: 33 and 37 for 40GbE ports, 41 to 44 in expansion slot 0 and 49 to 52 in expansion slot 1.

As you can see for QSFP+ module switch breaks 8 ports in two sets of 4 ports and picks the first number in each set for 40GbE ports. And for SFP+ modules it uses consecutive numbers within each slot and then has a 4 port gap.

Port numbering is described in more detail in MXL’s switch configuration guide, which you can use for your reference. But this short note might help someone to quickly knock that off instead of browsing through a 1000 page document.

Also, I’ve seen pictures of MXL switches with a slightly different port numbering: 41 to 48 in slot 0 and 33 to 40 in slot 1. Which seems like a mirrored version of the switch with a built-in module on the opposite side of it. I’m not sure if it’s just an older version of the same switch, but keep in mind that you might actually have the other variation of the MXL in your blade chassis.

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Old share mapping upon reboot

When you change share mapping in users AD logon scripts, for example if you move share to another server, after a reboot users can still see an old path in their drive mappings. Usually it happens if you forget to unmount drive before mounting. If share was already mounted before it won’t remount to a new one. To get rid of that, always add something like net use N: /d /y before mounting line.

However, sometimes it screws up. In case you steel see an old share go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ MountPoints2 and remove cached record for this share. It will look something like ##SERVERNAME#SHARENAME. After that you will hopefully have your share automatically mounted to the correct path.