Bronx cheer to Nortel
Oct 2, 2003
I picked up a used, as-is Bay Networks BayStack 303 managed switchnthis summer for $19. I finally got around to cleaning it up andntesting it and, to my surprise, it worked. It evidently had spent itsntime in Norwood, Massachussetts and all I can say is that peoplenshould take the time to properly decommission equipment before itnturns up on Ebay. So I reset it to factory defaults and configured itnfor my home network. These were, in 1997, very nice switches and camencomplete with a web management interface in addition to serial, telnetnand SNMP. They also came with a number of serious bugs that were fixednwith later releases of the firmware. This one had never been patchednand still had the original 1997 A release. Nortel acquired BaynNetworks years ago and they have conscientiously kept all the Bay (andnSynoptics and Xylogics and Wellfleet…) documentation and updates onntheir website even for these long discontinued products. Except thatnyou can’t get access to the firmware updates without a servicencontract. It’s not unreasonable in this industry to give away patchesnfor products, particularly end-of-lifed ones, but Nortel doesn’t seemnto agree. I’m not looking for a free copy of Optivity- their very nicennetwork management system, which, by the way, they do allow for a freendownload- I just want an existing bug fix.