North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Ascend GRF
On Thu, 6 Nov 1997 09:44:33 -0600 (CST) Joe Shaw <[email protected]> wrote: > Now, we got our GRF 400 from Ascend in the middle of August of this > year, and It was an impressive piece of equipment. My first problem with > it out of the box was the "The GRF for Dummies" instruction manual. The > docs on setting up the ATM interface were inaccurate, and after 3 calls to > their technical support we were able to get the OC-3 ATM interface to > work. Yah the docs do suck a little, fortunetly I manage to figure it out without phone ascend. > After that, I had OSPF working on it in under 5 minutes, and was > seeing routes in the IP table acquired via OSPF, so I was confident. > Getting BGP configured in any sort of usable state was a different story, > but after a few days it was set up and working. After all of this, I was > losing confidence in it's ability to work reliably. > > After we let it run for a while, we noticed the GateD daemon would just > die at weird times with no error messages. So, we tried changing the > config, I don't believe this at all. One good thing about gated is that it has loads of logging features. > looking for any sort of misconfiguration, and found none. We also > had a problem with the GRF not acctepting all the routes from our > upstream, but when I tried to use their monitoring utility to see the > routes, it was missing a key feature; the pause after it showed one > screens worth of data. Nothing like seeing a full routing table flash > before you, and if you tried to ctrl-c out of it, you killed gated. I agree about the pause, but ^c doesn't kill gated it kills gsm. > It > was just really frustrating, and we decided to send it back for a Cisco > 7200. The GRF has great potential, but the monitoring tools, SNMP daemon, > and documentation need to be completely redone. The monitoring tools are not that bad IMO, the page pausing is a pain I agree but yes the documentation needs more. ESP on gated. > Not to mention that > looking on their web site for technical information or setup help on a > product is pointless. Even though it was a brand new product and we were > supposed to get immediate support on it for the first 30-90 days, it took > between 2-6 hours to get a call back from Ascend tech support for > configuration help. At least with Cisco, if I have a question or a > problem, I can usually check out their web page or the cd-rom and get the > answer. > This is true. > Your network and needs may vary and the GRF may work great in your > situation. For mine it did not. As I know gated well I guess I had an advantage in know gated. I've not had any problems with it seeing routes via BGP, OSPF is a little buggy and I think Ascend would do well to put on hold the IS-IS stuff [no doubt UUnet are pushing for this] and finish getting the other stuff finished. Regards, Neil. -- Neil J. McRae. Alive and Kicking. Domino: In the glow of the night. [email protected] NetBSD/sparc: 100% SpF (Solaris protection Factor) Free the daemon in your <A HREF="http://www.NetBSD.ORG/">computer!</A>
|