[196] in Resnet-Forum
Re: Asante 2072
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Charley Kline)
Mon Mar 21 10:28:21 1994
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 1994 09:12:14 -0600
To: roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith), resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
From: cvk@uiuc.edu (Charley Kline)
At 6:59 AM 94/03/21 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
>We're on the verge of picking hubs for our first dorm wiring project. I
>recently got an announcement (I expect many of you got the same one) from
>Asante for their 2072 hub which looks like it has the features we need at
>a good price. Our MIS department is balking at the idea, prefering
>another vendor's much more expensive hubs. I've got a couple of days
>to try and convince them otherwise before purchase orders are cut.
>
>Has anybody used the 2072 in a production network? Were you happy with it?
>Any problems? Would you buy one again? Not?
I just installed two 1012's on our mainframe network (one on each segment
of a bridged FDDI/Ethernet subnet), and our network design office just used
two 2072's in a largish building redesign.
I for one am really happy with them. We're suffering the same inexplicable
symptom you are, in that the higherups seem to want to spend more money for
other equipment.
I wouldn't use them in our residence hall networks because we have
extremely hefty port security requirements on our dorm networks which only
one or two vendors satisfy right now. Other than that, though, the Asant=E9
feature set seems to be better than average, particularly with regard to
manageability and the kinds of per-port statistics they keep, and the
features seem to work as advertised.
The only downsides I can see to the Asant=E9 gear is that I don't believe
they have any way to plug faster technology cards such as FDDI into their
backplane, so you're stuck at Ethernet speed (which isn't a bad thing; we
find the combination of Ethernet switches and 10baseT hubs a good performer
and cheap too).
I should also mention that there is apparantly a fairly annoying bug in the
version 1.4 SNMP agent on the 2072 in that it won't return port statistics
in table form; you have to go after the individual ports one by one. To be
fair, I just discovered this on Saturday and haven't called Asant=E9 yet
about it. We may be running old code or they may have already fixed this;
I'll find out today.
--
Charley Kline, UIUC Network Architect cvk@uiuc.edu
"Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we
grasp it--in a decade, a century, or a millennium--we will all say to each
other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid
for so long?" --John A. Wheeler
