Lots of interesting banter :-)
As a fairly large local ISP, we've just started using Livingston/Lucent
hardware, and it's doing good things and bad things to my sanity.
Good thing: I configure it, plug it in, it works
Bad thing: It makes my 12 USR Total Control racks look like broken
toys.
It's like this: I have 2 PM3s with PRIs doing ISDN and two PM3s running
K56Flex modems, I have 12 USR TotalControl racks, all x2 modems and two of
them also running ISDN, I have 2 Ascend MAXs wich I refuse to upgrade to
k56flex 'cuz I've never seen it work right. They are borderline even with
33.6, why should I toss a new chipset into the mix, right?
When I get a new chassis from USR it takes nearly a week of burn in,
tweak, poke and prod to finally get it running right. The other day I
rebooted four of them, and it took me two days to RE-burn, RE-tweak, and
RE-prod them into working order, and I know these things inside out. I
don't get nearly the help from their tech support, I generally find that I
know more than they do, and their web site (totalservice.usr.com) bites.
If you do a keyword search on "routing" in their documentation, looking in
the documentation for ALL of their products - even as a registered user of
the TotalSwitch and TotalControl products, you get NO MATCHING ITEMS!! If
I'm looking for a command I just go to the livingston site, and hope that
the command I find there exists in the older code that USR snagged.
I had one of the ISDN cards on a USR chassis go down as I was preparing to
bring up two PRIs on a new PM3. I worked on the USR chassis for an hour,
had their tech support help me on it for an hour (meanwhile denying access
to about 15 dedicated users), gave up and put that PM3 in it's place.
Including configuration and mounting, cutting and making new cables it
took me 15 minutes from the time I cleared the decision with the boss
until I had it up and customers were on line.
My k56flex users are much happier with it than any of my x2 users ever
were. Especially the gamers, who are getting consistant ping times equal
to single-channel ISDN.
Just my 2 bits. Thanks to all the guys at Livingston/Lucent!!
------------------------------------
Timothy A. Gregory
Northwest Link Systems Administrator
Arabic > English Translator
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