Thus spake Clint R. Sparks
Well my 2 cents here as well, I know that none of us likes to pay for things we do not feel are fair or will use but it is like paying for car insurance, you may need it someday and it will be worth it believe me.
You've not worked with this equipment for very long, have you? ;) Seriously though...a large number of the people on this list are quite capable of supporting ourselves on this equipment largely. We need hardware coverage of some specific cards...for IgLou, we need to cover DSP's, we don't need to cover Arc's really since we have some spares, and we *CERTAINLY* don't want to cover quads since they're pretty much disposable at this point.
Besides I never see anything about others charging for support but I have news just about all do. We use Cisco equipment and it is the same deal you have to buy a support contract or pay by the support call after the warranty period is up.
But with cisco, you can get a different level of coverage on each piece of equipment if you like...try doing that with 3Com. 3Com won't even honor it if you have different levels of coverage *at different sites* (as Paul Farber just pointed out...and has happened to us in the past...even after 3Com gets the money for it...that's borderline illegal there, breach of contract).
Besides I have much worse problems with phone companies than equipment manufacturers, telcos are the real root of all ISP's problems.
Heh...you'll get no argument from me on that one! :) -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456 - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.