I have an Ascend Pipeline-75 here at my house (would have loved to use
a OR-U, if it had POTS ports, but it dosen't), and it has supported STAC
for quite sometime. I have also used it to connect with another P50 and
had no problems in that respect. So as we convereted to PM3's in house I
ended up losing my data compression, till this new card for the PM3.
So I installed the card, booted the PM3, and during the startup it
informed me the compression card was recoginized, so I smiled. Then I
told my P75 to connect to it using STAC (The P75 supports STAC, MS-STAC,
and STAC-9), and saw no improvement in througput moving a very compressible
file. As Livingston says they support MS-STAC, I then tried that with the
same results, 0 increase. So I thought what hte heck, I have no idea what
this STAC-9 is but it's worth a shot. I setup for STAC-9 and then made
the transfer and get about 525kbps, man did this make me happy!!
So I wrote to Ascend and asked what the heck was STAC-9, and was told
it was the open standard form of STAC, where regular STAC mode is specific
to Ascend (I can live with that). As usual everything seems to have a
down side in this world. I ran with STAC-9 selected for several days, and
would find that every now and then when performing a lot of data movement
over the link that things would freeze. Then only way to correct this was
to drop my connection and re-dial. I had this happen a great many times,
and usually when moving a lot of data over the link (I have a 24/7 connection),
as during my idle time I never saw it die. So I disabled the compression
on my end (thought he compression card is still in the PM3), and figured
I would run a few days like that. No more lockups, everything was back
to perfect, just less throughput.
So my questions are as follows regarding the compression.
1) If M$-STAC is supposed to be supported, why dosen't it work?
2) Why am I seeing connection hangs when using compression that requires
a complete link reset?
3) Is the ComOS 3.5.1b20 incomplete in regards to supporting this card
and the various STAC modes, or should I expect to continue to see the
above troubles even with the new ComOS 3.7 when it's released?
I suspect compatibility between Livingston and Ascend should be of some
importance as there is a lot of Ascend gear in the field as well. I figured
I would post this to the list as well as send it off to support, as I would
be most interested in hearing the experiences of other users who decided to
jump and get the new compression card...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet : howardl@abs.net | Howard D. Leadmon
UUCP : wb3ffv!howardl | ABSnet Internet Services
PHONE : (410)-361-8160 | 200 E. Lexington Street
FAX : (410)-361-8162 | Suite-1602
PACKET : WB3FFV @ WB3FFV.MD.USA.NA | Baltimore, MD 21202
WWW : http://www.abs.net |