>Matt Holdrege <A HREF="http://www.ascend.com">http://www.ascend.com</A> matt@ascend.com I have not observed that the maturity of an Ascend product has any bearing on stability or reliable operation. In fact, our mature Ascend routers are the only unreliable components in our operation, while our Cisco products (like the new AS5200 we received from among the very earliest release which has worked flawlessly). Here's an example (ticket #162005). Before writing to the list I took Matt's advice and sent in a request for technical support. We're running two Maxes -- release 5.0Ap27 is loaded in both. After 2-5 days, the Maxes stop acccepting any incoming calls and cannot make outgoing calls successfully. We have to reboot. There's no obvious way to detect the condition until someone complains. At first, the engineer indicated that nobody had reported such a problem before, and suggested that we use the debug facility and look at radif and the wan debug information. We observed that the Max never made any requests for radius authentication (the server was still running). The engineer indicated that the wan packet dump didn't show anything useful. However, one engineer today said that he had seen this same problem (then why isn't it in a database somewhere so the other engineers know about it?) and suggested we turn off proxying. Why? He didn't have a reason -- he just thought it might have been related. (In fact we plan to do this anyway - but the engineer turned it off without any warning, so all our isdn routes were lost to our backbone router. This is not a trivial change to be made in the middle of the day). This is very typical of the tech support we've received from Ascend. They have us "try" things that often don't seem to have any relation to the problem at hand. On three different occasions, these attempts to solve problems have resulted in much more serious disruptions of service while the Ascend engineer messed with our routers. As another example, we wanted to merge our two Maxes so all the profiles would work interchangeably. The documentation wasn't just unclear -- it's virtually non-existent. So we waited for assistance from Ascend (and thanks to Matt, after about 3 weeks somebody was prompted to get back to us). We were assured that we could make the transition smoothly, without disrupting our normal services. For the next four days, we had major periods of instability while the engineer assisting us had us try one thing, then another. For example, he had us set Ascend-ppp-address a certain way for every profile. When that broke things, he had us set it another way. Finally he determined that the function changed after a certain release and we should try yet something different. This should have been a very straightforward operation -- surely other people are running more than one Max. Apparently nobody has tried it at Ascend (if they have, then why didn't they share their knowledge with us in the first place?). I know that the engineers were sincerely trying to help to the best of their abilities. But Ascend doesn't seem to have much regard for the quality of service we have to provide while trying to debug their "mature" hardware. At this point I have much more faith in a brand-new Cisco product than a mature Ascend product. Incidentally, Cisco has a web page that lists every test they perform for every software release, major or minor, that's very informative. Maybe the Ascend quality control people should look at it. Mike Berger Shouting Ground Technologies, Inc. ++ Ascend Users Mailing List ++ To unsubscribe: send unsubscribe to ascend-users-request@bungi.com To get FAQ'd: <<A HREF="http://www.nealis.net/ascend/faq">http://www.nealis.net/ascend/faq</A>> </PRE> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <STRONG>Follow-Ups</STRONG>: <UL> <LI><STRONG><A HREF="msg11034.html">Re: (ASCEND) Maturity or Second Childhood</A></STRONG></LI> <UL> <LI><EM>From</EM>: Vesa Halkka <vhalkka@cc.helsinki.fi></LI> </UL> </UL> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <HR> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg11002.html">Re: (ASCEND) BGP 4 ?</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg10999.html">Re: (ASCEND) BGP 4 ? (fwd)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg11001.html">(ASCEND) Two P130's connecting</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg11034.html">Re: (ASCEND) Maturity or Second Childhood</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="mail2.html#11004"><STRONG>Main</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thrd251.html#11004"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> </BODY> </HTML>