I like off-lease hardware. Yep, I'm cheap, not parsimonious but fiscally responsible.

It's amazing what you can pick up for under $200 (including shipping and warranty) in the used market. In the case in point, a pair of HP DL360G6es which made good lab concept machines.

I lent them to Gaige for a proof of concept exercise. He plugged them into a Juniper QFX5100 and the iLO2 (old 100mbit-only) console ports didn't come up without jumping through some hoops. Something about a 10G/1G switch not properly autonegotiating with questionable 100 mbit ports.

He got it whipped into shape this morning. Here's the secret sauce:

{% raw %} gaige@VA2-router-1> show configuration interfaces ge-0/0/33   description ipmi:test2; speed 100m; link-mode full-duplex; ether-options {     no-auto-negotiation;     no-flow-control; } unit 0 {     disable;     family ethernet-switching {         vlan {             members ct-mgmt-ipmi;         }     } }

{master:0}
gaige@VA2-router-1>

{% endraw %}