Also sprach Brad Gass
I've got a chance to buy a 48 port v.34 TC chassis (12 quad v.34 modems, NetServer PRI, Dual PRI NAC, Management Card, etc), but my question is pretty basic -
I'll say ahead of time...the NETServer PRI is a bad idea. They have been end-of-lifed at 3Com (read: no support at all), and had quite a few rather significant bugs in their software code at the time they were discontinued.
Is a TC chassis configured and equipped for PRI also useable in a channelized T1 environment (non-PRI)? I know some equipment will work with either/or, and others will work with one or the other and not both.
Sort of...the hardware is perfectly capable of it. The only change that needs to be made is that the dual-PRI card needs to have the channelized-t1 card code flashed to it. The Dual-PRI card and the Chan-T1 card were sold as seperate cards, but they were basically the same...at least later on. Early Chan-T1 cards used 186 processors and are only chan-t1 cards, later chan-t1 cards and all dual-pri cards used 386 processors and could be either chan-t1 or pri, the only thing that changed was the software flashed to it. Since it says dual-pri card, you're good, since all dual-pri cards could be flashed back with the chan-t1 code and run chan-t1 with no problem.
I don't have PRI available at the POP I've got in mind for this gear, and since it's super-rural, v.90 is completely worthless. That's why v.34 digital (and fully managed) is ideal.
The upgrade from v.34 digital to v.90 is a software flash and a software enable key for the NMC, so if you want to give v.90 a shot, its probably not much hassle to give it a shot (you'd be surprised where you *can* get v.90 connections sometimes).
I'm also not totally sure everything I need is in this chassis, but I can deal with that later, after I pester 3Com in the morning to correct the links to all their documentation!
It sounds, from your description above, like you're pretty much set...at least all the NACs that you need are there. TC terminology is that the longer cards that go in the front of the chassis are NACs, the shorter ones in the back are NICs. With a fully digital setup like you're talking about, you'd need the dual-pri/chan-t1 NAC, and NIC, the 12 quad digital modem NACs (no need for NICs on these, they just draw power and aren't used for anything in this setup), some sort of gateway card NAC and NIC (you mentioned the NETServer PRI, I'd *strongly* suggest that you consider getting a HiPer Arc in its place, you'll be much happier), then the management (NMC = Network Management Card) NAC and NIC, and of course, power supply or supplies NACs and NICs. These chassis can run fully redundant power supplies on them, but in the configuration that you're talking about, it certainly doesn't need it. With the newer style chassis (with the integrated fan tray) you even have 2 seperate power cords, so you can plug them into diverse power sources if you want to go that far with your redundancy. -- 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.