Brandon's Blog

As a millennial who grew up during the networking transition from 10/100M to gigabit, my RadioShack trip to purchase that first gigabit switch remains a formative memory — an investment that felt extravagant at the time for equipment that would become standard within a decade.

In early November 2025, while researching cost-effective ways to implement 10G networking in my homelab, I stumbled upon a trove of information and a wonderfully amusing meme culture built around the Brocade brand (owned by Ruckus Networks) in the ServeTheHome forums. Watching a 200GB VM backup crawl across gigabit for 25 minutes while you’re trying to test something else gets old fast. Now? The same transfer completes before I can pour a cup of coffee. What follows in this post is the course taken to go from mere curiosity to implementation.

Cable standards #

Achieving a 10G-capable network can be as simple as using existing Cat5/Cat6 cabling and 10Gbe ports if your switch has them, but I had to learn the difference between Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables and fiber, and that most enterprise equipment uses SFP+/QSFP+ ports which allow for both short-distance copper cabling and long-distance optical fiber SFP module connections.

Fortunately for everyone building out a homelab, purchasing the cabling required for 10G networking is widely available from places like Amazon and other online vendors instead of having to source from a networking supply vendor directly and deal with their sales department.

No time like the present #

In my current network, 10G capabilities began to surface when my first UDM-Pro was purchased. The UDM-Pro has dual 10G SFP+ ports for a WAN and a LAN connection, configurable in the Unifi Network software. Over time several other Ubiquiti devices were purchased and followed most recently by a USW-Aggregation switch sporting 8x10G SFP+ ports. The aggregation switch came earlier in 2025, bridging the UDM-Pro, USW-Flex-2.5G-8, and existing USW-24-POE switches in the network closet rack.

Work then began on building out a StarTech mobile 4-post open rack outside of said closet when I began building out my homelab with more servers and needed to connect the two racks with high-speed connectivity. Starting out with a single gigabit connection between the two racks turned into upgrading to using the Flex 2.5Gbe switch which sports a 10G SFP+ port thus requiring the aforementioned USW-Aggregation to utilize its high bandwidth allocation.

The closet-based network rack is installed about 3-4m in cable-length away from where the mobile server rack lives outside of said closet and there was no direct connection between the two racks, but eventually a low-voltage wall passthrough with a brush plate was installed to make cabling easier to outside the closet and into the mobile rack through the wall separating the two.

Do you even switch, broh? #

While the USW-Aggregation switch was purchased primarily for aggregating the equipment in the network rack, there was nothing of similar equivalency in the mobile rack. This got me thinking: why not add a less-expensive 10G switch in my mobile rack if I can find one, and everything can be connected with only a few cables instead of small handful that was accumulating every time a new device was added? Purchasing another USW-Aggregation made sense but at the eye-watering price of $399 CAD purchasing two in a short period of time was not in the cards. As it turned out, there were some reputable 10G switches on the used market that were relatively inexpensive for their bandwidth capabilities.

The forum thread and firmware upgrade documentation painted a clear picture: these Brocade switches were the hidden gems of the homelab world. I felt I’d gathered enough information to make an informed purchasing decision and began browsing various online marketplaces to see if some of these same deals could be scored within Canada that some of the folks in the thread had found in the USA. It turns out there are multiple e-waste recycling companies within Canada who resell retired, but still useful, enterprise equipment online and will ship them straight to your door.

A single reseller in Montreal, QC, had many used Brocade ICX7250-24P units available and according to the STH forum thread this was a great choice cut of beef (again, the memes around this brand are great) with 24x1G ports with PoE and 8x10G SFP+ ports (two are available for use right away and the remaining six are activated with an honour-based license agreement during configuration). The decision was obvious: I needed one, and at the (relatively) low price of $123 CAD all-in how could I say no? It arrived to my house within seven days well packed, complete with a power cable and rack ears. There was some minor scuffs and scrapes from usage over the years but that was to be expected.

Setup and configuration #

One of the downsides of this switch coming from being in the Unifi ecosystem for some time was having to configure it using only the commandline. I’m no stranger to using the terminal because I practically live inside an editor and a terminal for my day job, but when you are spoiled by the UI of Unifi Network for so long, there is a bit of a learning curve at first. Traveling back in time to my university days and remembering nothing about configuring Cisco gear in our labs did not help. VLAN tagging syntax? Port mirroring commands? Nothing quite mapped to my Unifi mental model.

Fortunately we live in an era where LLMs and AI can aid us in these tasks so using something like Claude to help me build the correct configuration made a tonne of sense. What helped most in getting timely answers that didn’t deviate from the original context was every time I started a conversation with Claude a blurb of information describing my existing network, the devices in it, and what VLANs had already been configured, along with what physical connections existed between devices as well, was pasted and kicked off the back and forth.

In order to configure this switch before it can be deployed into a network, it must be physically connected to with a console cable over USB to perform the initial configuration, though fortunately SSH is an option once configured. Cobbling one of these cables together based on the information provided in this Reddit thread and these few images of a cable adapter that someone made with an ethernet keystone punch-down wasn’t terribly difficult. The idea is that you can use a standard Cisco programming cable that is terminated with an RJ45 end, but connected to this cable adapter it changes the pin-out to work with Brocade devices.

Once you have a working cable, connecting to the Brocade switch is easy on macOS with stty and screen (connecting with other operating systems will likely differ):

stty -f /dev/tty.usbserial-<ID HERE> cs8 -parenb cstopb crtscts
screen /dev/tty.usbserial-<ID HERE> 9600

After some time playing with various configurations, breaking VLAN assignments and being unable to SSH into the switch, resetting, rebooting, and reconfiguring, I finally felt confident to deploy it. Before doing so, I grabbed a copy of the show running-config output and saved it to a file so it can always be referenced and updated when changes are necessary. This file is stored alongside some other IaC files for managing Komodo and Docker containers.

Not all cables are made equally #

The first troubleshooting challenge came from an unexpected source: faulty 10Gtek 3m SFP DAC cables. When trying to configure the switch I noticed a pattern that every five to six seconds the terminal would freeze. After hours of troubleshooting why this might be happening, I finally got a lead to run show statistics brief ethernet 1/2/7 to 1/2/8 and noticed there were an increasing number of In Errors and Out Errors every time the command was run. Hours of troubleshooting with Claude and bouncing my experience off a former colleague—after questioning my configuration, re-reading forum posts, and second-guessing every decision that led to this moment—it became clear: bad cables. This was the first time in my personal life that I’d encountered a bad commercially-made cable so I ordered a new set and they worked just fine. I’ve since bought quite a few of their affordable cables and not had another issue.

Once the switch was up and confirmed running correctly, a 10Gtek dual-SFP+ card for my unRAID server was purchased to upgrade from the 2.5G onboard NIC. After receiving the card a few days later, installing, and configuring unRAID to use it as the default NIC, port bonding was enabled to use link aggregation and port aggregation was configured on both switches to give the machine 20G of bandwidth to use 🔥.

Switch modifications #

One of the recommended modifications for these switches is a fan upgrade as the stock fans have likely received hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of running time. While they are enterprise-focused and fan noise is typically not a concern for most server rooms that are already temperature controlled and require hearing protection to access, running them in a homelab inside a home office where one spends most of their time is a different story.

Ordering these exact Delta fans was the obvious next step as they’re highly recommended in the above thread for their capacity to move air. Fortunately I had a fellow amateur radio operator in the area making a DigiKey order that day so he added them to his card and they arrived a few days later. Once I had them in hand they were installed in place of the OEM fans.

When the switch was powered on and it booted to the running state of the OS where the fans ramp down from 100% during the boot cycle, they were so quiet I thought they were wired incorrectly. As it turned out, no, they were running but ever-so-quietly. I highly recommend making this modification. It’s very easy to do if you’re comfortable soldering!

Trade & tariff troubles #

In early February 2026, an identical Brocade ICX 7250-24P switch was purchased from the same seller as a backup in case they were never to be seen again and at the time of purchase it was somehow less expensive this time at $117 CAD, and the seller’s page “only had a few left” according to eBay. Even a week later after receiving the switch, the seller now has no available units so I’m glad to have purchased the second one when I did! There are a few sellers in the USA but it is incredibly cost-prohibitive to even consider this.

Allow me to jump on a soapbox for a moment and say for us Canadians, purchasing practically anything from the USA since late-2024 has become an incredibly difficult task: not only are we already subject to the Canadian dollar being 35% less the value of the US dollar, add in the heavy amount of completely wild and out-of-control tariffs thanks to the cheeto-face administration, and the extortionate customs fees charged on top of this, and you can see why it makes for a very eye-watering pricing situation.

Something in the US may be advertised as $100 USD plus shipping costs, but that is $135 CAD and could easily reach $200 CAD when it arrives at your door. The tears really start pouring out when you want to purchase bespoke multi-hundred or multi-thousand dollar items!

As a Canadian, it is saddening and disgraceful that an administration, more specifically the orange-faced-man, could go so far out of their way to destroy any shred of possible trade negotiations between two historically close countries. I am fortunate that Canada has a strong technology sector and that corporations typically purchase this enterprise equipment new and subsidize the cost heavily, but for the common person it is very disheartening.

Looking to the future #

The one thing that surprised me about this saga is that I could upgrade my whole lab without spending too much money. Getting two switches for under $250 CAD (minus the cables) is a very good sign that a 10G network can be accomplished on a relatively low-cost budget. While I know through experience now that having 10G capabilities is amazing and almost unnecessary for pretty-much everyone, it does allow me to make quantifiable decreases in time spent moving data around the network at near-instant speeds.

I likely won’t be upgrading further anytime soon as my ISP speed is currently limited to a 5G symmetrical fiber internet connection, however casually looking at 40G and 100G networking equipment for the future has started; with power comes great responsibility, but also a much larger electricity bill as well 😂.