> When we encountered lots of problems with our Maxes, the technicians > told us to turn off lots of features too (and we were ONLY running > ISDN). So we disabled STAC and VJ Compression, turned off Radius and > used exclusively local profiles, etc... and some (but not nearly all) > of our problems disappeared. > Our solution was to scrap it all and buy Cisco. You can load all the > interfaces on a Cisco box -- even a low end one. One of Ascend's > recommendations was that we were overloading the box by trying to > connect lines to all the interfaces on it. Advertised features, > like compression, work. And you can use them in combination with > other features! > > After getting an answer like the one you mentioned above, that should be > a clue that there are fundamental problems with the equipment. > > Mike Berger Mike, I think the DSL equipment we're using is sufficiently different to the older remote-access products to not suffer from many of these problems. Most manufacturers are guilty of this sort of thing occasionally. I think the Max4000 was underpowered for most applications. Cisco have done this too, they are not exceptional. The old 2501 routers would often not cope very well if you wanted to run both X21 interfaces at 2Mb. The more modern higher-end stuff is not free from problems either. Ever seen Cisco's own performance figures for gigabit-ethernet cards in the 7500 and 7200VXR routers? Don't expect more than 400Mb throughput, maximum, often a lot less if you're pusing a high number of packets-per-second. Oh, and don't put too many 100Mb ethernet ports in those big chassis - you can't always fill them with high-bandwidth rated cards and expect things to run well when the traffic levels start to rise. Their router performance leaves much to be desired these days. Cisco's strongest feature is without a doubt their software. They're now getting kicked about all over the place by companies like Foundry, Juniper, and Extreme. Often this is in areas where they traditionally have had some of the best products. I've spent enough time with Cisco equipment to have due respect, and I'd happily continue to use the routers for many applications. I can safely say that scrapping it all and buying Cisco would not really be a valid solution here, as the company I work for is primarily a Lucent distributor :-) We are also a reseller for Arrowpoint equipment, which now makes us a Cisco reseller. I advocate choosing the best tools for the job, and much of Cisco's stuff these days is simply mediocre. Lucent's APX is arguably superior to a rack-and-a-half of AS5300s. - Matt ++ Ascend Users Mailing List ++ To unsubscribe: send unsubscribe to ascend-users-request at bungi.com To get FAQ'd: <http://www.nealis.net/ascend/faq>