Re: New NAS

Duane Schaub ( dschaub@terraworld.net )
Fri, 19 Jun 1998 09:15:12 -0500

I have had VERY good luck with my PM3's. Livingston, unlike Ascend,
doesn't release code until it is relatively Rock solid. After some effort
with previous Pipeline 50, 75, 130's and Max 1800's - I have sworn off of
all Ascend products except the P50/130 for end customers. The upper end
models simply don't have the huevos to keep up. Witness the Max 4004 which
was originally sold as a 96 port solution and has now been de-rated to the
4048. The 4004 would only do 60 simultaneous PPP sessions. Computone used
to make a termserver with more ports than it could handle. This was our
original impetus into Livingston. The PM2's were popular for a reason!

In an effort to shave costs, we have recently tried BayNetwork Remote
Access 5399 and 8000 units. I am here to tell you that BayNetwork does not
understand the Market. Their product was so complicated that I finally
printed the 1800 page manual and it took nearly two weeks of configuring to
get the thing to accept calls. Now that I am more used to it, they have
some VERY powerful capabilities, but it makes Cisco look like a cakewalk in
the initial configs. I mean this thing has an http server, ftp server,
finger server, telnet, temperature readouts.... everything. But don't
expect to make it run right away, and don't try using the "Quick Config"
utility that is shipped with the unit... It doesn't work!

One last item.... Compatibility. The Bay Boxes have PISS POOR
compatibility with older modems. Specifically, they will NOT connect to
USR (Manufaturer or OEM models) with Eprom dates of 5/30/96. This includes
the TI manufactured Telelink II modems used by Gateway and 10 other leading
compatible vendors and includes at least 15% of our customers. Even though
the problem is actually a USR bug, I have never had a problem with these
users until the Bay units arrived....

I am currently running the Livingston V.90 beta code. Unlike normal, they
released the beta code for general testing. Although the code works well,
I get an occasional problem where the PM3 will simply stop authenticating.
A code update is expected soon. The previous 56Flex release did not have
these problems. BayNetworks has not released any V.90 code.

Bottom Line... We have $100K of Bay equipment that is being exchanged for
PM3/4's. For the ISP... BAY SUCKS!

On the positive note - They have Very responsive support (not free) without
which these boxes would have been dumped when they arrived.

Duane Schaub.

At 10:51 AM 7/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I will be upgrading our NAS to do 56k and have found that populating my max
>with 56k cards would cost more than buying a new max already populated with
>modems.

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