On Wed, 30 May 2001, Ricky Beam wrote: > >... At least the Ascend routers (before the TNT) > >had a menu to help you navigate the configuration. > > Oh, come on. The TNT interface isn't that bad. It takes a few seconds to > get used to, but it makes sense. If you want an example of horible... go > configure some 3com switches/routers. (From a software standpoint, the TNT > interface is far more efficient than a menued interface.) Well yeah, the interface on the TNT isn't anywhere near as bad as the CVX and we found at least 3 things we liked better about it than what Cisco and Nortel showed us. I like the fact that you can list the current config as you edit it (make and change and see it before you save it.) Losing the stats interface is going to hurt too. But I'm tired of having to reset routers every few days because the TNT is a terrible choice for a backbone router (wasn't my choice) and some idiot has a war dialer that keeps calling one of our pops and almost all of the modems end up in the 195 list. To be honest, the easiest one I ever had to configure was a USR Total control chassis with a network management card and a ternminal server card. I seem to remember only having to do a few things to set them up (of course that was a long time ago, we had seperate routers, and I definitely remember driving all over Florida replacing defective modem cards. A lot of bad modem cards.) But the real point here is that we can't depend on Lucent for a reasonable level of support (even with a service contract.) We need a small box that can take a T1 frame and a PRI, answer inbound ISDN and modem calls, and offer a menu to non-PPP callers. That just about perfectly describes every Ascend router we ever bought. We just can't justify throwing away good money on a service contract if Lucent is going to force us to prove that every problem we have is really a problem and have them come back later and say: (pick one) 1. "I don't see what's wrong with that." 2. "That's a feature." 3. "Well, no one uses that anyway." 4. "It works fine if you use our software to manage it." Just as an example, I "discovered" that they broke the snmp interfaces table again in the 8.0.x series for the 6000 and TNT. After a couple months of going back and forth with their techs with me providing a router on my network that they could log into and see the problem (the snmp interfaces table was returning the wrong interface number for some connections. compare the route table and iftable via snmp) I finally gave up and told my boss to start looking for new routers. The one that did it for me was the message I got back that said "See, it works" even though the data I'd sent showed the route table listing an interface number that didn't exist in the iftable for the default route. I knew we should have just sent the routers back when at least 6 in a batch of 18 died within 2 days of installation. Oh the other hand, the Cisco 3660s we're buying will let us do everything we do with the 6000s and TNTs. And now we can provide different menues based on the phone number dialed (we have a POP in every county in Maryland and a different menu for every POP.) That means we can finally start to consolidate our PRIs (we don't have that many dialup users) and dump the savings into growing the network. Add to that the fact that there is no good way to bond 2 T1s in a max 6000 or a TNT and you can see why I gave up on Lucent. I do realize that these routers do still have a place any many networks. If you're only going to use it for dialup, it's a nice little box that can be had pretty cheap on ebay. They just don't do what we need and based on the quality of service we've been getting, we've descided to move on. -- Steve Haavik Sailor Operations Center shaavik at soc.lib.md.us Office: 410-396-5551 Cell: 443-829-1532 Pager: 443-829-1532 or 4438291532 at page.nextel.com or pshaavik at soc.lib.md.us ++ Ascend Users Mailing List ++ To unsubscribe: send unsubscribe to ascend-users-request at bungi.com Archives: http://www.nexial.com/mailinglists/