RE: (ASCEND) Max 6000 problems.

["Troy Settle" <troy@picus.com>]

I've had my share of problems with Ascend equipment, but nothing that bad.
With 30+ boxes deployed, I've only had to RMA 1 of them.  If it wasn't for
the fact that I know nothing about your or your experience, I'd be tempted
to say that it was most likely an issue with the operator.

Anyways, for alternatives, I'd reccomend the CVX1800 from Nortel.  We've had
one up for a month now, and have had 0 problems.   The box takes 1344 ports
(2xDS3), soon up to 2688 ports.  You can fit 3 of the suckers on a rack, and
they just work.  Configuration is a breeze once you understand the layout,
and these things include support for nifty things like VOIP, SS7 signaling.
The OS supports the concept of virutal POPs, policy based routing, etc...
All in all, a very sweet box.

Contact your nearest Nortel rep.  You won't regret it.

-Troy



** -----Original Message-----
** From: owner-ascend-users@max.bungi.com
** [mailto:owner-ascend-users@max.bungi.com]On Behalf Of Steve Rothanburg
** Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 1:48 PM
** To: ascend-users@bungi.com
** Subject: (ASCEND) Max 6000 problems.
**
**
** 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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