Ascend Archive
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(ASCEND) Showing We Care
To illustrate how much Ascend cares, let me recount some of our
experiences.
In January we reported ongoing problems -- things that had not
been working right for weeks. We reported three problems (some
of which had been reported in previous trouble tickets but were
not the primary problem and were not dealt with).
* Disappearing routes. Clients would connect but their networks were not
routed properly. The problem was sudden and unpredictible.
* Severe packet loss 20-60%. Again, it was intermittent and only
some connections were affected. Most people ran normally when the
problem occured.
* BRI's not resetting properly. And since fixing the previous
two problems requires rebooting, this meant that we could never
do it remotely.
We had months of exchanges. We gave Ascend access to our routers
(despite previous experiences demonstrating that it was not always
a good idea), sent them copies (several times!) of our radius
configurations, and responded to the same questions over and over
again. Incidentally -- Ascend ought to be careful when they ask
for rationalizations as to why things are set up a particular way.
We use trunk groups even though all lines are part of the same
group because the Ascend software was broken and wouldn't work
without them. We set up our radius profiles the way we did
because Ascend's software was broken at the time and that was
how they suggested we make it work. Basically, if you see a
questionable configuration decision, odds are it was to get around
broken Ascend software.
And here's how I know Ascend cares.
A couple of weeks ago, the Chicago area ISP account manager called
and offered to come by with a field engineer to see if they could
help solve our problem. I enthusiastically agreed. We set up an
appointment, and they came as scheduled.
The engineer asked a couple of questions about our configuration
(which had really been covered in the multitude of previous
exchanges with TAC) and then sat silently for the next two hours
as the ISP managergave me a sales pitch for the TNT.
My business partner thought I showed remarkable restraint.
Our Max 1800's don't work. The Netopias blow the Pipelines out of
the water. Our Cisco Access Servers stay up for months -- when we
reboot it's generally because of a new software load or a UPS failure.
The best possible sales pitch Ascend could have given me would have
been to fix the problem.
Ascend cares -- about making a sale. And apparently that's the
end of it.
Mike Berger
Shouting Ground Technologies, Inc.
direwolf@shout.net
*
> ------------------------------
>
> From: Andre Beck <beck@ibh.de>
> Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 11:00:15 +0200
> Subject: (ASCEND) Ascend going mad ? (was: Stable code for Max 1800)
>
> Hi,
>
> now it is not the first day trashed with an Ascend problem for me, but
> what I heard back from EMEA support on one of the most esoteric
> problems with Max1800s really shocked me. It is ignorance at its best,
> and it finally gave me back the feeling that reporting bugs to the TAC
> is ABSOLUTELY USELESS because nobody cares about them. Note that I was
> currently developing the impression that this feeling might be wrong.
>
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