Re: (ASCEND) MAX 4048

[Peter Eriksson <peter@ifm.liu.se>]

On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Kevin Scott Walker wrote:

> Okay all, I have a mystery here.  If anyone has heard of this or
> something similar, please let me know!
> 
> I have two Max 4048 boxes running TAOS 7.0.4.  They were running
> perfectly answering calls from Southwestern Bell T1's until just a few
> days ago.  Now, most customers are getting dropped every 4-5 minutes
> like clockwork.  Bell has seen timing slips on two circuits, one on each
> box.  Could this be an issue with the Max or more likely an issue with
> Bell?  I've tried everything I can think of to remedy it from this end
> including a clean load of the TAOS and configuration.  They've tried
> replacing the hdsl cards on both ends of the circuit and that hasn't
> helped.  Does anyone have an idea?

I have something similar here. A Max 4000 with two 16-modem (56K) cards
talking to the swedish national phone company via an E1 line (slightly
faster than a T1 - supports 30 concurrent calls). 


Installed it about a year ago and it has worked more or less perfectly,
until about a month ago when things started to downhill. My users 
started to get disconnected at random intervals (directly, 1 minut 
and the whole spectrum up to half a day... (but most got kicked out 
quite quickly). Some users even get a "syntetic message" from the
phone company that "the phone number you are calling can not be
reached right now" (or something similar (and in swedish :-)).


The phone company claims everything looks fine from their side, and
the vendor who sold me the Max says my config looks fine. We've tried
replacing the Max with another unit. We've tried swapping out the modem
cards. We've tried firmware 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.22 and 7.0.26. To no avail.


I've noticed a couple of things though - my Max behaved *really* bad
when I ran it with only one modem card (not only the analog users, but
also ISDN users got kicked out) inserted (didn't matter which one).

I'm currently running my Max with four modem cards instead of two
and it seems to work better, albeit not perfect. (64 modems is more
than twice as many modems as the E1 line can support so that is
ridiculous... - Especially as we normally have around 6-7 concurrent
users at peak hours right now :-)

The thinking behind trying out four cards instead of just one
or two is that the cooling of the modem cards should be better
since the air doesn't as easily will bypass the rather tight 
opening of the modem cards (compared to when I ran the box with
only two modem cards). Of course I would have prefered to use 
some dummy cards instead. The thought occured to me when I read
(via DejaNews) about a lot of temperature problems with Max 4000
systems previously... (I've check my unit's power supply and it 
is the 2.5Amps version :-)


And the two extra modem cards I only have for loan to be able to
diagnose this problem so I'll have to return them soon.


I'm getting more and more fed up with this crap and I've started
to regret that I choose it instead of a similar Cisco box... :-(

(The price was 30% lower for the Ascend box).


Any suggestions on what to try next would be *highly* welcome...

-- 
Peter Eriksson <peter@ifm.liu.se>         Computer Systems Manager/BOFH
WWW: http://www.ifm.liu.se/~peter/                 Phone: +46 13 282786 
Linköping University, Department of Physics, S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden

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