(ASCEND) Max 6000 problems.

[Steve Rothanburg <srothan@soc.lib.md.us>]

Well, since I'm still in the queue for an engineer to call me back I'll
ask my questions here instead.

First, I'd like to say that we actually have a support contract with
Ascend/Lucent and having to wait a week and never receiving a call back
from an engineer is really pissing me off. I've been waiting for a RMA
number on an ethernet card for a TNT for well over a month and now I've
got a stack of 7 6000's with a laundry list of problems. The person that
answered the phone at Lucent said "I'm sorry, but I can't do anything
for you. If you want you can call our 900 number for faster service."
Are you saying that now we have to pay by the minute if we need to talk
to someone this week? Even after we pay for a service contract?

Ok, enough of that. We discovered that if you do an SNMP query for the
routing table in a Max 6000 running 8.0.1 software (tbaxkh.m60) it
returns the wrong IF number for most routes. We had this problem in the
TNT's in the 2.x series code also. I did check a TNT this morning and it
looks right. 

A while back I RMA'd a 6000 that died a few days after we put it at a
site. The replacement now refuses to route IP. I also have 6 more 6000's
that showed a variety of ethernet weirdness at customer sites. One is so
far gone that I can't get it to take a TFTP load over the ethernet. The
usual symptoms from the rest are ethernet ports that just stop working.
They just seem to stop sending and receiving packets. On a couple of
them I can reset the router and have it run for a day before it happens
again. A few of them don't work at all at customer sites but with the
exception of the one that won't tftp, they all seem to work fine on the
bench here.

Does any one know if there is another vendor worth moving to? We are
considering Cisco we haven't heard anything about their dialup stuff.
Right now our modem pools are actually kind of small (16 modems in most
of our sites) and i don't honestly know if they're likely to grow much
(we provide free text mode access to the internet for the residents of
the state of Maryland via telnet into a computer running lynx.) We're
even considering some options to bring all of the remote dialup access
into a few (or just 1) TNT's and replace all of the 6000's with
something for frame relay access. One of the reasons we bought Ascend
hardware to begin with is the port density and the integrated CSU/DSU's.
I always hated using a separate CSU with the cisco 2501's.

Any suggestions other than "look for a new job?" I hear forestry is
nice...

Steve Rothanburg
Sailor Operations Center
www.sailor.lib.md.us
srothan@soc.lib.md.us
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