Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!labrea!jade!saturn!eshop From: eshop@saturn.ucsc.edu (Jim Warner) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: DSU/CSU units Message-ID: <876@saturn.ucsc.edu> Date: Tue, 22-Sep-87 21:46:43 EDT Article-I.D.: saturn.876 Posted: Tue Sep 22 21:46:43 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 25-Sep-87 07:25:26 EDT References: <8709221539.AA06394@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Reply-To: eshop@saturn.ucsc.edu (Jim Warner 408-429-2606) Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz; CIS/CE Lines: 31 In article <8709221539.AA06394@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> OPRBBDM@TCSVM.BITNET (Bryan McWilliams) writes: >Kurt, In response to request for CSU/DSU Go with Verilink. you can >order them through DCA direct at 404-442-4244. They're 2395.00 each, but >if you can get the educational discount you'll save another 30%. > I wish I could be so positive about Verilink. It looks like they are nothing but trouble from my perspective. Ours get into funny states which they can't recover from without pulling the plug. I mean that literally. They have no on/off switch or reset button. The factory recommendation to unjam one of these things is to pop the modules out with the power on. That grates. There's not even a button to force it out of loopback mode (again - just pull the plug). I wish I could be more specific about what "funny states" means. What we think happens is that something happens to a phone circuit that causes a lot of errors. After several hours of whatever mistreatment the phone co has to offer, the Verilink finally gets confused, looses sync and locks up. After the phone line has gotten good again, the Verilink doesn't recover by itself. Besides that, they break a lot. We're working on our third unit this year. Another thing that's been a headache is their 8ZBS encoding. While the encoding itself isn't a problem, the equipment that our telco gives its people sees a circuit that is working perfectly as having thousands of errors per second. In fairness to Verilink, this last point is mostly a telco problem, but the bottom line is that our phone co can't passively monitor our line to tell us what it looks like from their perspective. That hurts.