(And I was serious, not sarcastic, about the 'blazer. YMMV,)
Martin,
That's OK, I never got work for a router vendor after that, a solution
that I've now completeley generalized, having discovered a trivial but
obscure and beautiful technique, as any good mathematician must.
However, since I was most of the QA for the NetBlazer, and whiled away my
paid hours with making tcl/tk scripts to irritate units under test, which
was somewhat novel in 1991, silly stuff like bringing up and tearing down
a connection all night long to prove the existance of a memory leak, and
networks to prove the function of rip, I'm curious what part of the
NetBlazer was a piece of shit?
In this period of time, the White Knights built the InterOp shownets and
we had comparative access to quite a lot of vendor product, and know that
the red buttons on Wellfleets were correctly positioned on the front, for
easy access. We used NetBlazers for dial-up outbound (we were topologically
quite diverse by '91, our last show in the San Jose facility) and I don't
recall anything ... resembling the behavior that I could characterize as
POS like function.
Data please, but off-list. Bill will be interested too I expect.
Eric
Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net> writes:
In this period of time, the White Knights built the InterOp shownets and
we had comparative access to quite a lot of vendor product, and know that
the red buttons on Wellfleets were correctly positioned on the front, for
easy access. We used NetBlazers for dial-up outbound (we were topologically
quite diverse by '91, our last show in the San Jose facility) and I don't
recall anything ... resembling the behavior that I could characterize as
POS like function.
My recollection of that show was "T-1 to BARRnet", not
bonded-Netblazer-dialout, but I didn't "work the show" until the
following spring, so my recollection could be at fault.
I wouldn't characterize Netblazers as being particularly cruddy
compared to other options available at the time. Remember that this
was the era of the Cisco ASM, the Encore/Xylogics Annex (Wellfleet
hadn't changed their name to Bay yet, much less bought the Annex
product line), some nasty 3com terminal server of which my memory has
thankfully purged most details and the gone but not lamented Cisco
TRouter. The Netblazers worked pretty darned well when plugged into
Telebit modems. Third party modems, well, there were a lot of knobs
you could twist, and not the best in the way of documentation on what
to do with 'em.
Based on my experience with them, I'm quite sure they were fabulous
devices capable of being configured in the field to do just about
anything, if you had the level of familiarity with their internals
that someone who worked QA for them would have had.
---Rob
Netblazers were fine except the Telebit lied about the SYN35 card
being usable with a T-1.
Bad terminal servers? How about overpriced ones like the USR Total
Control Hubs.