But as certain people have said, the PM3 is pretty close to the end of
its effective life for additional features. Multiple IP pools,
which were requested ages ago, will only be added to the PM4. VoIP,
ATM, DS3, etc. will only exist on the PM4. Lucent (not Livingston)
at least insisted that RIPv2 get developed.
I am sorely disappointed with several things about the PM4:
o You run one copy of comos for each blade. This makes IP pools messy.
I haven't played with more than a single card yet so I don't know how
routing aggregation on the chassis works - or if it does.
o The multiple copies mean you have to manage things on a per card basis.
While Livingston's java tools are getting better, managing the PM4 is
still messy. (I like CLI)
o Port density isn't quite there yet.
o Failure is limited to a blade. While this is nice, it also means that
you have to nail an entire blade to fix a problem. Other
high-density NAS products separate the interface (DS1/DS3, etc.)
cards from the modem cards so that you could disable the modems
and swap them separately. This issue is only going to get nastier
as port density goes up.
(I will admit that in the face of DSL and ISDN that this is a specious
argument.)
Certain of the issues, such as weird RADIUS output is being addressed.
One of the niceties that you get is that you don't do multi-chassis
stuff (MCPPP, NFAS) etc via ethernet broadcast. But I think you
are limited to your PM4 chasis - you can't span chassis anyway.
This is mostly an issue for MCPPP and not NFAS.
> At this point I think the
> modems work about as well as a PM-3 (Not sure if that is good or bad)
Excluding beta stuff that people want, the modem code is the number
one issue that affects current owners of PM products. There's also
a weird bug (Pm3, don't know about PM4) dealing with unnumbered PPP
dialout and routing, which is supposedly being fixed.
> Modems are NOT the future of an ISP's business.
I believe they will be for about 3 years more. Given the facilities
access issues that have been coming up, it is likely that the
inability to access DSL or cable will push most of the smaller ISPs
out of business. The great digital shakeup was just a prelude.
> - -Matt
-- Jeffrey Haas -+- jmh@msen.com -+- http://www.msen.com/~jmh /\/\sen, Inc. "Michigan's Best Run Internet Service Provider." - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>