Ascend Archive
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(ASCEND) Max1800 a good purchase? (partial flame)
I bought a Max1800 and two pipeline 75s lately and since
I've been following this list I am getting a bit worried
that I've made a bad purchase.
I know that reading a forum devoted to problems gives a
bit of a one-sided picture, but it is nonetheless sounding
to me like the products just don't work. Memory leaks,
one bad release after another, etc.
Should I be bagging the Ascend route in favor of Cisco,
or NT RAS, or something?
My company is a small software development company (15
people) and we bought the units just to have a reliable
and high-bandwidth dial-in facility for working (or
playing) from home.
I did shop around prior to buying the Ascends, and it
seemed to me that no one really competed on all the
features Ascend offers. On the other hand, that assumes
that they work.
Having looked at the way Ascend implemented NAT on the
Pipeline 85, I am a bit nauseated. They had a box that
supported multiple profiles in an almost reasonable
way, then they screwed it up by tying NAT to
the main profile in a way that totally conflicts with
the design.
The ip-address robbing fiasco is utterly ridiculous
as well. The idea of proxying any address that is
not identifiably local is ludicrous. That is what
default routing is for, and a proper ip stack won't
be sending arp requests for an ip address on a
foreign network anyway. I already had a misconfigured
Pipeline bring down my whole network. I had to reboot
all my boxes (you'd think there would be an arp
--clearcache command, wouldn't you?).
Every time I talk to tech support they tell me to turn
off some other feature or other because it doesn't really
work: STAC compression, CHAP negotiation with Windows
(don't tell me microsoft got it wrong, that is not
interesting. Most boxes work fine with Microsoft's
stack and how can one ignore the largest end-user install
base). IP addresses that are less than three digits in
one octet (that is apparently a reason they always use
100.100.100.100 in the examples). Bizarre extra configuration
parameters that aren't needed but have to be
filled in (like the name of the remote router, the ip address
of the remote router, or a password
in a configuration that will use the name/password list.)
At the moment I've turned off IPX routing because my Windows
95 machines won't boot when on the same network as a P85
with IPX routing turned on. I don't know why, but it's
damned inconvenient.
I don't know why Ascend has any kind of reputation with
all this going on, unless it is that the whole remote
access market is like this.
I am not writing this to complain in particular. I am still
plugging along trying to get the solution working. My intent
is to see what other people's perspective is on this set
of issues.
Thanks,
Larry Young
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