Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) In Defense Of Ascend...



On Mon, 23 Mar 1998, Robert Fournerat wrote:

> I would have liked to respond to sooo many things in this thread,
> but I simply don't have the time.  So please excuse me if I sound
> terse, but here are a couple of quick items that I think need to 
> be mentioned, and I don't have the time to fully discuss them.
>

I find your comment above humorous -- I fear how long your email would
have been if you *had* the time... I was expecting three sentences or less
:-).  



 
> 1) Matt Holdrege, you're wrong in your opinion of the difficulty
>    of supporting an application level product across multiple UNIX
>    platforms.  There are many, many resources from which Ascend 
>    could draw examples of how to implement portable software.  You 
>    might start by studying the emacs or perl distributions.
>
> 2) I have to admit that I dont understand how Ascend could argue
>    that the masses have spoken.  The majority of us use UNIX.
>    Why do you fight so hard to not support us?  BTW, my ISP also
>    uses Linux - exclusively.  I'm not opposed to other forms of 
>    UNIX.   Right now, Linux is simply the best choice.
>

Let me remind Ascend of one of the biggest reasons we, as an ISP, chose to
go with the Ascend Max series rather than Total Control boxes from USR...

Since we were not a start-up operation, we had a huge number of customers
-- we were using kerberos for pw authentication.  We wanted to have radius
hook kerberos to authenticate a user so we wouldn't have to deal with
hundreds and hundreds of users' pw changes.  USR told us that their
version of radius was available for NT and UNIX *but* they *would not* let
us have the source code and they had *no* intention of making a version of
radius that will talk to a kerberos database.... 

An Ascend engineer showed up at our door 48 hours after we put a call in.
He FTPed the radius server from their site and worked with us to hook
kerberos.  We recompiled radius and had it running, validating users via
kerberos, before the Maxen even arrived.

USR made it clear that they were supporting radius on UNIX boxes only in
the most limited way -- It only ran on Solaris and source code was out of
the question. They also made it clear that they would *prefer* it if we
ran radius on an NT box.  They *also* made it clear that their Total
Control software was only available for Windows machines.  Their rigid
attachment to Microsoft platforms truly pissed us off. 

This is one of the reasons we chose to work with Ascend and their product
line.  Ascend, please don't fall into the same traps as USR did --
technology companies in particular should know that its not as safe a bet
to ride the Microsoft bus when dealing with networking equipment as it
might be for a financial institution.  Your customer base has a huge
number of UNIX administrators -- don't lose sight of that... 

Steve



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