I don't have much experience with Ascend tech support yet. (And what I have isn't so great.) But my experience with Cisco goes back to *before* they sold their first router. The used to be grade-A whizzes throughout. Now they seem to consist of an inner core of sharp developers surrounded by a protective armor plating of technically illiterate phone-answerers, ignorant "customer engineers," incompetent "escalation engineers," and bumbling managers. It took them five months last year to fix a violation of RFC 1661 which could be described in two sentences and reproduced at will. It took a similar five months this year to fix a clear violation of 1812 and even then they offered me a version so raw (11.3) it isn't even shown on their web service site. In both cases months were spent convincing the flak-catchers that there really was a problem. In the former case, once they were convinced, nobody actually gave the case to the developer. When I got through to him directly at his snowbound farmhouse in Maine, he fixed the problem in a day. So don't tell *me* "my vendor good, your vendor bad." I've been around the block and I know better. As they grow, they all sharply raise their staff-to-clue ratios. __________________________________________________________________ Matt Crawford crawdad@fnal.gov Fermilab PGP: 0x566F63C5 - D5 27 83 7A 25 25 7D FB 09 3C BA 33 71 C4 DA 6A ++ Ascend Users Mailing List ++ To unsubscribe: send unsubscribe to ascend-users-request@bungi.com To get FAQ'd: <<A HREF="http://www.nealis.net/ascend/faq">http://www.nealis.net/ascend/faq</A>> </PRE> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <HR> <STRONG>References</STRONG>: <UL> <LI><STRONG><A HREF="msg09874.html">Re: (ASCEND) Re: sigh (bitching)</A></STRONG></LI> <UL> <LI><EM>From</EM>: Chad Kissinger <chad@onr.com></LI> </UL> </UL> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <HR> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg09912.html">Re: (ASCEND) Ascend Access Control RADIUS <--> Kerberos</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg09910.html">Re: (ASCEND) Re: sigh (bitching)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg09874.html">Re: (ASCEND) Re: sigh (bitching)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg09879.html">Re: (ASCEND) Re: sigh (bitching)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="mail5.html#09911"><STRONG>Main</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thrd195.html#09911"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> </BODY> </HTML>