Technology for Mortals

They’ve tried to bolt on a web GUI using Java, but it doesn’t map well to the command line and sometimes will outright break the command line or vice versa. I’ve tried to do it easier with templates like this http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=313 which tries to teach you how the command line works because I’ve found that it’s easier than any GUI.

What you need is a simple CLI template and a simpler network configuration and architecture. Your biggest problem is that your network architecture doesn’t make sense and no amount of UI simplification will help clean up your architecture.

http://www.adultswim.com/shows/venturebros/
I remember when one of the boys said tripple dog dare you and he got shamed and beat up for saying the bad tripple D word.

I actually just cleaned up that config tonight. The proof is in the pudding. I spent literally 20 minutes writing it, and it worked on the first try. It is also under 5 KB large, commpared to the previous 15 KB config, which was mostly static routing rules. This one involved a slight abuse of the ISP, but it is their own fault for not providing us with public IPs in a different network from what the external interface needs to be. In a nutshell, they expect that users (even those with 64 public IPs like us) to just NAT everything behind a $50 router.

The template configuration is definitely the way to go, I agree. For the config I just moved to, it was so simple I didn’t even need that.

J.Ja

Check out http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/dotu if you continue to bother going the Cisco IOS route (pun there for you)…

As for Juniper and Vyatta – they are worth your time and investment. Cisco is typically not unless you know what you’re doing and have weighed the competition. I don’t think any Cisco device was ever meant to be installed/configured by anyone who doesn’t put the proper time and effort into understanding the architecture of the hardware, software, and configuration capabilities.

My favorite recommendation to people who need badass network capability at an affordable price is Pyramid Linux. Pyramid Linux was meant to be run on embedded hardware such as the tiny Soekris boards. If you know Linux networking, then you’re set. Although XORP and Quagga have configurations that are similar to Cisco IOS – so maybe it’s best to move your frustrations towards IETF protocol writers, or possibly the inventors of the ARPANet. Of course — without them we wouldn’t be having this conversation, so your rant does seem a bit naive in retrospect.

Last I checked, Vyatta used a Juniper-like CLI unless they’ve changed in the last year. Not that there’s anything wrong with that and I think they’re a great Open Source solution. The only problem is that Cisco is a known quantity and with all their flaws, you know that a properly configured Cisco router will work and keep on working for years without a reboot.

When someone is willing to pay $4,000 a month for their Internet connection, they tend to not blink if you tell them they need a $20,000 Cisco router even if an open source solution could be built for $8,000 that runs just as fast. They also want that Cisco smartnet number to call if and when the shit hits the fan. A small business MIGHT consider it if they had the expertise but I doubt the typical corporation is going to bother. But of course, having Open Source companies like Vyatta challenge and pressure Cisco is always a good thing for Cisco and non-Cisco customers.

"The only problem is that Cisco is a known quantity and with all their flaws, you know that a properly configured Cisco router will work and keep on working for years without a reboot."

And this is what enterprises make decisions on. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Ammended to include Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and a few others. The "Freakonomics Blog" (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/ideas-for-making-baseball-more-interesting/) had a great post on this, in the context of baseball:
"A blunder by a manager is a move that is A) unconventional, B) doesn’t work, and C) occurs at a moment of focus in the game"

This applies in business as well. I agree, asking someone to set up a Cisco device who is not properly experienced can become a big mess, and probably cost more than getting the right consultant in to do it. And there are alternatives. But everyone accepts the status quo, so to deviate from it, regardless of the soundness of that decision, is to introduce a measure of risk to one’s career that is unacceptable.

Now, all of that being said, I did (at one time) actually have the training and experience to do this, it was just 3 or 4 years ago and much of it has slipped out of my head over time. I still know networking cold, but the details of IOS are hard to remember.

J.Ja

Personally I find it hard not to see a simular business plan between the two of them. To most business and commericial users all computers are “Windows” (even when there is a cute little “Tux” sitting on the display screen) and all networks are “Cisco”. We are in fact, for the most part the glue between the clueless in thebusiness-technical composit world. Is there less expensive, and perhaps better set-ups? Of course, But they would required work. And an understanding of what lies outside of those box mentalities businesses are acustomed to. -Just my opinion, of course. -d

Check it out: Linux on Cisco — http://www.crn.com/networking/207401900
(Article) "Cisco’s Linux-Based ISR Opens Road For Customized Solutions"

Seriously though — cisco Systems is so 1988 and open-source TCP/IP routing software (e.g. gated) is so 1978. The problem with Juniper and Vyatta is that they are 20-30 years too late to the game.

You’re complaining about setup of a redundant T1 with what, a few /24′s? IOS has been the same for 20 years. The logo and branding is different and the hardware is a little smaller and quieter. The software crashes about as often, and the configuration is still difficult on the eyes. So much for innovation.

Can’t we talk about more important issues such as Google Guice and the new Spring Security Framework?

"The logo and branding is different and the hardware is a little smaller and quieter. The software crashes about as often, and the configuration is still difficult on the eyes. So much for innovation."

With all due respect, I’ve had Cisco routers running for years without a reboot. There’s a good reason people trust Cisco routers. I can’t say the same about their virus-prone (3 years ago) VoIP enterprise Call Manager though they probably much better by now, but the routers are solid. But again, I think Vyatta can be competitive and if it were my personal small business, I’d seriously consider the cheaper alternative.

Anyways, glad to have you here Andre. I didn’t have this level of dialog even on my ZDNet blog at least regarding Cisco that is.

Andre, register and you will not need comment approval. Sorry for the inconvenience.

FYI:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/26831

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9701/qa_c67_463943.html

Supported operating systems: Linux
An interesting turn of events indeed.

FYI:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26986

"What’s love..got to do with it…got to do with it…"

>> The software crashes about as often, and the configuration is still difficult
>> on the eyes
>
> With all due respect, I’ve had Cisco routers running for years without
> a reboot. There’s a good reason people trust Cisco routers. I can’t say
> the same about their virus-prone (3 years ago) VoIP enterprise Call Manager
> though they probably much better by now, but the routers are solid. But again,
> I think Vyatta can be competitive and if it were my personal small business,
> I’d seriously consider the cheaper alternative.

Yes, Cisco IOS is stable, and the hardware is stable — in labs with no running traffic.

Stability, reliability, availability, update — all of these things only come through strategic, operational, and tactical IT/Operations management backed by solid decision-making. Without controls such as change management, any organization may as well be dead in the water.

Almost anything (not just Cisco) can be made stable under the right conditions; the right set-and-setting. Downtime is almost always the direct result of a lack of proper controls around change management. If downtime is caused during proper change management — then the problem is lack of controls around risk management.

Cisco routers keep running fine when you don’t touch them, don’t change the network architecture, don’t change their configuration, and when your network traffic doesn’t increase. I’ve seen Livingston Portmasters with uptimes of 11 years and Cisco routers with uptimes of 7 years. Neither of these success stories (if you can call 4 dial-up users a month a success story) were due to their branding.

Sure, Cisco DE’s and SQE’s are dedicated to fixing defects in the products that they are responsible for — and they do it rather well. Sure, Cisco TAC responds to critical issues and will even rev an entire train of code due to customer reports of issues. However, I’d rather have 88 open-source developers from the community along with 3 in-house developers than 8 Cisco IOS closed-source developers and 3 TAC tech-support monkeys.

Buying Cisco because it’s considered stable or its name is attached to quality is extremely naive. Stability comes from process — it’s not something that you can buy off-the-shelf in any product (or service for that matter, especially a managed service). I’m not pro-Cisco or anti-Cisco. You use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that means Cisco. Just know what you’re getting into and what you’re buying before you make that leap.

Glad you like my commentary. It’s nice to see people still batting around age old arguments — while maintaining a friendly nature and nurturing interesting and involved discussion.

"Anyone who would attempt a ‘debug all’ command on a production router has no business ever logging into one."

I actually did that because all other debug commands were showing nothing occuring, and I wanted to verify that something was hitting the router, at least. In rare situations (like this one, where I was doing the initial configuration on an ISP connection with no DNS entries pointing to it), "Debug all" is not the killer "swamp the router" command that it usually is.

But yes, I am definitely someone who also favors bringing in a consultant for "one shot" projects like this. It does not make sense for someone who does this 3 times over the course of their career to spin their wheels trying to figure it out. Personally, if it had been even another year from now, I would have rejected this particular project from my queue, and I certainly did not volunteer for it to begin with! It’s been a while since I touched a Cisco device specifically, and despite the simplimicity of the configuration that I am working with, it is still a pain in the neck!

J.Ja

Anyone who would attempt a ‘debug all’ command on a production router has no business ever logging into one. I also doubt that someone who with that little Cisco specific knowledge would have the networking theory knowledge required to manage ANY vendor’s network hardware. I would recommend hiring (or outsourcing) a network engineer that specializes in that field as (I hope) you would for dealing with any high level project you didn’t have the experience to fully understand.

Check it out: Linux on Cisco — http://www.crn.com/networking/207401900
(Article) "Cisco’s Linux-Based ISR Opens Road For Customized Solutions"

Seriously though — cisco Systems is so 1988 and open-source TCP/IP routing software (e.g. gated) is so 1978. The problem with Juniper and Vyatta is that they are 20-30 years too late to the game.

You’re complaining about setup of a redundant T1 with what, a few /24′s? IOS has been the same for 20 years. The logo and branding is different and the hardware is a little smaller and quieter. The software crashes about as often, and the configuration is still difficult on the eyes. So much for innovation.

Can’t we talk about more important issues such as Google Guice and the new Spring Security Framework?

For anybody who really thinks nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco…

http://www.secomct.nl/downloads/dallas%20city%20manager%20fires%20cio%20and%20assistant.pdf

The streets are littered with failed VoIP implementations mlm1393, but thanks for your link!

As I said above, my confidence in Cisco extends to their routers, switches, and firewalls. Their VoIP system was an utter failure in 2003/2004 when I last worked on it though they may have gotten better. Back then the system got infected by worms. The network it ran on had VLAN recalculation storms that fluctuated up and down once a week.

I am of the firm believer that you run your VoIP system on a physically separate cheap switch at $30/port on its own cabling and run it on a completely isolated network. Either that or you use these Xorcom USB-based channel banks and run analog end points. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1071

Just to clarify, though… while it is too tough for the typical person who does this 3 times over the lifetime of a router to be doing it, it SHOULD be easy. Environments that never need to be changed are usually not that complex either. I see no reason why doing something simple like having 1 local subnet, a T1 line, and a cabled modem/ADSL/FIOS line (1 for redundancy) should be such a chore.

J.Ja

Dre, you’re right that Cisco IOS isn’t perfect and that it only applies to IOS configurations that are static. Cisco also started doing semi-annual security patch updates which unfortunately 99% of the Cisco population never touch because they think the Cisco is an appliance you don’t need to touch. I’ve also had some crazy problems with IOS on some site-to-site VPN configurations and they were pretty crazy to troubleshoot.

But overall, the Cisco routers, switches, firewalls (PIX and ASA), and Access Points are rock solid and I know I can sleep fairly well at night running Cisco on my core network infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it is a known quantity. However if I started my own small business and I was looking at a $20K Cisco router versus a $10K Vyatta solution, there is a good possibility that I’d be looking hard at Vyatta because $10K goes a long way to support the family. But if it were someone else’s budget, I probably wouldn’t bother and I’m just being honest with you. However, that is a natural bias I built over the years because I’m very familiar with Cisco gear and I know what most of the pitfalls are that I need to avoid. But if I had a lot of experience using Vyatta and I had more confidence in it, then that would obviously change.

"I see no reason why doing something simple like having 1 local subnet, a T1 line, and a cabled modem/ADSL/FIOS line (1 for redundancy) should be such a chore."

It wouldn’t be a chore if you didn’t have someone micromanaging the architecture

It’s a given that there’s room for improvement everywhere, Cisco notwithstanding. Why is it though that the bigger they get, the less they care to listen? Is this an inexorable consequence of human nature that belies the highest levels of achievement, or simply corporate culture narcissism and smugness? Inquiring minds would love to know.

I think it is really hard for big companies to listen. Another issue is that after a certain point, a lot of companies outsource their help desks (regardless of what country it is in), and that makes is extraordinarily difficult for persistent issues to get to the product teams. I used to work for a help desk like that. If anyone ever said, "what are the top 10 problems with our products and how can we fix them?" we all would have said the same things. It would have taken but a few months to sort them out (in this case, a particular power cord for a specific model was problematic, the Web site was not clear about one or two pieces of information, certain models lacked an obvious method of resetting them to factory defaults, the Web UI for the units was poorly worded in some spots and lacked obvious ways of doing certain tasks, etc.). They could have turned us from a 10 – 12 person call center to a 2 person call center in 3 months, if only we had direct (or even indirect) access to the product teams. Of course, since our employer was paid by the trouble ticket, we had no motivation to help them improve, either.

I talked to some folks from Microsoft in April, one thing that they told me was that over the last 5 or so years, they gave the support teams who feel the customer’s pain access to the product teams. Think about it. The company has been around since 1975, and it was only the last 5 years that customer suggestions and complaints and trended "this seems to be a persistent issue" could make it to the folks who can fix it? Sadly, this is not uncommon. When companies are small, the product developers are also part time support, or Level 2 or Level 3 support. Maybe the CTO is also the lead developer, or participates in the QA process, etc. As the company gets bigger, less and less are management involved in the day-to-day activites that handle customers. By the time a customer complaint reaches the CEO or even the VP level at a 500 person company, it is because the contract is at risk, not because they are feeling a bit of pain.

So even for the companies that want to do a good job, it takes time. In addition, even if those customer complaints and suggestions get to the right people, it can be hard to make changes to the product. Windows is millions and millions of lines of code that are planned out months or years in advance; it is hard to steer that project to react quickly. Sometimes the dumb, useless feature in the current release is a predecessor to a feature planned in the next release that builds on it, and so on. Big companies and big projects have a lot of inertia, for better or for worse.

J.Ja

Good response Justin, and well thought out. It does seem to be the inexorable roadmap of “progress”, with all the fallout that rides shotgun with it. I guess it underscores something that is pretty obvious to most of us, which is the sooner you learn to listen, the better. But translating that obvious cause and effect quotient into reality (and product improvement) is rarely an easy feat.

I think that issues like this have an awful lot to do with the "cycle of company size":

* Small, agile, inovative player breaks into established market, or creates an entirely new market.
* The small company does quite well, rapidly gaining market share or expanding the market; customers love the responsive attitude, innovative thinking, and fresh approach to business.
* Small company gets some money; they’ve all been working 60+ hours/week due to a lack of employees and too many customers while they "ride the wave". Some of the money is used to hire new employees, some of it paints the office bright primary colors with brushed nickel accent pieces and frosted glass, replacing the "scrounged from the college surplus store" furniture that the company was started with.
* The "help desk" grows up; instead of direct dial numbers to the lead programmer (with a $20 RadioShack answering machine for "voice mail") for support, customers get a 800 number and a 6 digit number to punch in when they call for support, so that the system knows if they are qualified to talk to tech support at that time of night.
* The salespeople start making outrageous claims, supported historically by heroics from Product Development.
* Product Development has now expanded to include not just the really smart founders and their really smart friends who all work 80 hours/week because this is their baby, but now includes average and even medicore engineers who insist on a 40 hour work week.
* Customers wake up and realize that their vendor looks just like the mega corporation that they cancelled their previous contract with.

Look at Google for a great example of this at work. They are now looking an awful lot like Microsoft (or Oracle for that matter) when it comes to a good many shady business practices. Apple too. They still have some innovation, at least, but they are a REALLY nasty company, and outside of their design/UI folks, I have not been impressed with their engineering.

J.Ja

As a small business with 2 telecommuters and apopters of MSCRM 3 (now in the process of building out a FM database to replace the majorly flawed and time wasting customization of MSCRM) We were convinced by a cisco rep that the UC520 was perfect for us. It has a MSCRM connector avaliable that would automatically dial and pop up contacts if they called in and would pop up a service case if one was open for a customer when they called in. Humm. I was sold! After 3 days of a cisco programmer sitting next to my servers…the UC520 was working. Remote workers were up and going. One had a VPN capable cisco router and a 7901 phone. The other used software VPN and a softphone. Great!
Here we go…
1) The main selling point (THE reason we went with cisco) The CRM connector never worked. Complete mess. The client would crash non-stop and wouldn’t work at all on XP64. And, the server that runs MSCRM has been slow ever since. (fail..major fail..why’d I buy it?)
2) I got the software VPN user a new computer. Had to get her new MAC into the router. Uhhh..can’t do it thru the very limited GUI. Had to pay about $200 to get the programmer to do it, cost almost as much as the computer. (fail)
3) Moved office location. New static IP. I needed VPN router IP changed and UC520 router IP changed while also adding expansion 4 copper line card installed, and enabling 1 fxo port. How much could that cost? A couple hundred maybe? Nope…looking at about a grand. (fail…that should be as simple as installing a new video card and adjusting a few settings…this is 2008!)
4) Asked my cisco programmer why the UC520 was hanging up on people when they entered the wrong extension. He said that’s how it’s programmed. Told him to fix it. He said it would take "a couple hours of programming" A COUPLE HOURS TO PROGRAM! just to tell it not to hang up on my customers!
Cisco makes products that work..sure. But their move to the small business sector is laughable. When the cisco programmer got done with #3 above, he said "man, it’s like this thing is backward" He was quite frustrated with it…the best part was he was frustrated and I got to pay him a lot of money to be frustrated. He was on the phone with cisco for a long time just to figure out how to enable 1 fxo port and he said cisco didn’t even know how to make it work. And I got to pay for it.
And, after 6 months we still can’t get any new ring tones or a new picture other than the default – lame as hell picture on the phones.
Note to cisco..if you want to make a product for small business. Make it user friendly. Give people that aren’t cisco programmers the ability to modify how things work. Don’t promote a plug-in to make a sale that doesn’t and possibly hasn’t ever worked (MSCRM). Don’t boast about features that are actually not avaliable on the UC520 (which is also completely limiting…MOH is limited to like 1MB!!!) Don’t make a small business have to pay $400 to change where press #5 for whatever to press #6 for whatever. (and we do our own audio and convert it to G711 and load it) Don’t charge me 1 user licence to enable an FXO for outgoing only. For the love of God, let me poke a hole in my router without having to know your programming language, next month I’ll need port 1701 and 500, bet that will cost a couple hundred.
In cisco’s defense, they came out with an updated Gui last recently. But I was told by my cisco programmer NOT to do it for at least a few months. There WILL be bugs, and let others work them out. GRRRR… It’s 2008, why isn’t it all GUI, and why can’t a small business network admin admin his own flippin router!
We were misled as to the capabilities and ease of management by cisco. But like I said. It works.. just cost a fortune to do or change anything. //shaking fist in air

ben

As a small business with 2 telecommuters and apopters of MSCRM 3 (now in the process of building out a FM database to replace the majorly flawed and time wasting customization of MSCRM) We were convinced by a cisco rep that the UC520 was perfect for us. It has a MSCRM connector avaliable that would automatically dial and pop up contacts if they called in and would pop up a service case if one was open for a customer when they called in. Humm. I was sold! After 3 days of a cisco programmer sitting next to my servers…the UC520 was working. Remote workers were up and going. One had a VPN capable cisco router and a 7901 phone. The other used software VPN and a softphone. Great!
Here we go…
1) The main selling point (THE reason we went with cisco) The CRM connector never worked. Complete mess. The client would crash non-stop and wouldn’t work at all on XP64. And, the server that runs MSCRM has been slow ever since. (fail..major fail..why’d I buy it?)
2) I got the software VPN user a new computer. Had to get her new MAC into the router. Uhhh..can’t do it thru the very limited GUI. Had to pay about $200 to get the programmer to do it, cost almost as much as the computer. (fail)
3) Moved office location. New static IP. I needed VPN router IP changed and UC520 router IP changed while also adding expansion 4 copper line card installed, and enabling 1 fxo port. How much could that cost? A couple hundred maybe? Nope…looking at about a grand. (fail…that should be as simple as installing a new video card and adjusting a few settings…this is 2008!)
4) Asked my cisco programmer why the UC520 was hanging up on people when they entered the wrong extension. He said that’s how it’s programmed. Told him to fix it. He said it would take "a couple hours of programming" A COUPLE HOURS TO PROGRAM! just to tell it not to hang up on my customers!
Cisco makes products that work..sure. But their move to the small business sector is laughable. When the cisco programmer got done with #3 above, he said "man, it’s like this thing is backward" He was quite frustrated with it…the best part was he was frustrated and I got to pay him a lot of money to be frustrated. He was on the phone with cisco for a long time just to figure out how to enable 1 fxo port and he said cisco didn’t even know how to make it work. And I got to pay for it.
And, after 6 months we still can’t get any new ring tones or a new picture other than the default – lame as hell picture on the phones.
Note to cisco..if you want to make a product for small business. Make it user friendly. Give people that aren’t cisco programmers the ability to modify how things work. Don’t promote a plug-in to make a sale that doesn’t and possibly hasn’t ever worked (MSCRM). Don’t boast about features that are actually not avaliable on the UC520 (which is also completely limiting…MOH is limited to like 1MB!!!) Don’t make a small business have to pay $400 to change where press #5 for whatever to press #6 for whatever. (and we do our own audio and convert it to G711 and load it) Don’t charge me 1 user licence to enable an FXO for outgoing only. For the love of God, let me poke a hole in my router without having to know your programming language, next month I’ll need port 1701 and 500, bet that will cost a couple hundred.
In cisco’s defense, they came out with an updated Gui last recently. But I was told by my cisco programmer NOT to do it for at least a few months. There WILL be bugs, and let others work them out. GRRRR… It’s 2008, why isn’t it all GUI, and why can’t a small business network admin admin a router.
We were misled as to the capabilities and ease of management by cisco. But like I said. It works.. just cost a fortune to do or change anything. //shaking fist in air

ben

Ben -

I feel your pain. Trust me, I do. We just found a way today to take the Cisco routers completely out of the mix and RMA them, because we just could not get them to do what we needed them to do.

J.Ja

As a small business with 2 telecommuters and apopters of MSCRM 3 (now in the process of building out a FM database to replace the majorly flawed and time wasting customization of MSCRM) We were convinced by a cisco rep that the UC520 was perfect for us. It has a MSCRM connector avaliable that would automatically dial and pop up contacts if they called in and would pop up a service case if one was open for a customer when they called in. Humm. I was sold! After 3 days of a cisco programmer sitting next to my servers…the UC520 was working. Remote workers were up and going. One had a VPN capable cisco router and a 7901 phone. The other used software VPN and a softphone. Great!
Here we go…
1) The main selling point (THE reason we went with cisco) The CRM connector never worked. Complete mess. The client would crash non-stop and wouldn’t work at all on XP64. And, the server that runs MSCRM has been slow ever since. (fail..major fail..why’d I buy it?)
2) I got the software VPN user a new computer. Had to get her new MAC into the router. Uhhh..can’t do it thru the very limited GUI. Had to pay about $200 to get the programmer to do it, cost almost as much as the computer. (fail)
3) Moved office location. New static IP. I needed VPN router IP changed and UC520 router IP changed while also adding expansion 4 copper line card installed, and enabling 1 fxo port. How much could that cost? A couple hundred maybe? Nope…looking at about a grand. (fail…that should be as simple as installing a new video card and adjusting a few settings…this is 2008!)
4) Asked my cisco programmer why the UC520 was hanging up on people when they entered the wrong extension. He said that’s how it’s programmed. Told him to fix it. He said it would take "a couple hours of programming" A COUPLE HOURS TO PROGRAM! just to tell it not to hang up on my customers!
Cisco makes products that work..sure. But their move to the small business sector is laughable. When the cisco programmer got done with #3 above, he said "man, it’s like this thing is backward" He was quite frustrated with it…the best part was he was frustrated and I got to pay him a lot of money to be frustrated. He was on the phone with cisco for a long time just to figure out how to enable 1 fxo port and he said cisco didn’t even know how to make it work. And I got to pay for it.
And, after 6 months we still can’t get any new ring tones or a new picture other than the default – lame as hell picture on the phones.
Note to cisco..if you want to make a product for small business. Make it user friendly. Give people that aren’t cisco programmers the ability to modify how things work. Don’t promote a plug-in to make a sale that doesn’t and possibly hasn’t ever worked (MSCRM). Don’t boast about features that are actually not avaliable on the UC520 (which is also completely limiting…MOH is limited to like 1MB!!!) Don’t make a small business have to pay $400 to change where press #5 for whatever to press #6 for whatever. (and we do our own audio and convert it to G711 and load it) Don’t charge me 1 user licence to enable an FXO for outgoing only. For the love of God, let me poke a hole in my router without having to know your programming language, next month I’ll need port 1701 and 500, bet that will cost a couple hundred.
In cisco’s defense, they came out with an updated Gui last recently. But I was told by my cisco programmer NOT to do it for at least a few months. There WILL be bugs, and let others work them out. GRRRR… It’s 2008, why isn’t it all GUI, and why can’t a small business network admin admin a router.
We were misled as to the capabilities and ease of management by cisco. But like I said. It works.. just cost a fortune to do or change anything. //shaking fist in air

We got tired of existing tools so we worked on a graphical tool to explain whats going on in your cisco router and switches.

http://www.actionpacked.com

We got tired of existing tools so we worked on a graphical tool to explain whats going on in your cisco router and switches.

http://www.actionpacked.com