These are Cisco branded and look like new-old-stock, which is nice.
Along with a piece of single-mode fibre for testing, they work in the Catalyst and the Mikrotik switches that I have -- but not in the Procurve. So it's not just complaining, it's also not using the SFP (and I believe that's the case for the generic one that I was testing at the weekend).
Worst case, I can at least get something working by using the Cisco as a dumb bridge, or putting one router port on the Cisco and one on the Procurve. Hopefully the HP-enabled SFP shows up in a few days and we can put this chapter of our lives behind us.
Also new job! It's only day one but I'm still excited, even as we move from "candidate" to "employee".
Now to see if one truly can grow bored of pizza.
Colocataires is live in its new datacentre.
It did, indeed, turn out that unbranded SFPs do not work correctly in the Procurve, so we used the Cisco switch as an over-kill media convertor. I think three hours, including security set up, to rack and establish connectivity. Not bad!