Scenario: We have a Ascend/Lucent (since Lucent bought Ascend a ways back) GRF 400. It stopped working. No problem! We have a backup replacement unit. (which cost a good bundle, let me tell you.) Oops. We don’t remember how to get it restored to what the old GRF was set to. No problem, we’ll get support from Ascend/Lucent. It’s no longer under maintenance contract, so we’ll have to pay to get support. No problem. We bust out the Amex card. So we call up Lucent on Friday about 3 to 4pm. We want to get tech support for this GRF and get it up and running.

That’ll be $20,000, then $500 per hour after that.

Um, is that canadian dollars? Because that is way too much. Even the “evil” Microsoftt does not charge that for technical support. I mean $20,000 is a bit high. But tack on that $500/hour too. Holy crap, I want to work for that company if they’re actually gettting that kind of money for non maintenance contract support.

So we want to buy a contract. Mind you that this is the sales guy. Does he want to go home on a friday? Sure he does. So he tells us that we can’t get one made up until Monday. Bull$hit.

So we took out the GRF and probably will set fire to it in the parking lot outside. Good Riddance, Ascend/Lucent. You’ve lost one customer. Not that it matters to them. One customer isn’t going to kill them if they’re tech support costs that much for routers.

So why all this fuss? Keep reading.

So the network dies. Can’t get to the outside, the inside cannot get into any of the sites. Wow. Crazy. The SBC Network guys are helping with trying to get connectivity back up on the network. No go. Finally, get one guy who decides he’s going to take on the big task by himself and works with us. Cool.

Now, it’s friday on about 2am. We’ve done everything. Taken out the GRF, trying to at least get something to work. We get things rolling finally. We have external sites up and running. We leave it alone after about 5am. During the middle of the day, it’s down again.

Sunday. Finally the bell guy and mike get things rolling. It’s now 7pm. Most of the stuff is running. They narrowed it down to a bad switch. So network cables are getting switched from the bad one to the new one.

Getting other things operational. It’s now about 10pm. Come to find out, one of the windows domain controllers is spazzy. And I mean total intermittent issues. No one can log on to the network. We decide to take that down. We now have one working domain controller. Because the old server was also taking care of a few other things, we had to replace those on the working DC.

It’s now 1am. Finally have the windows domain working fine. Me and Mike’s macs are working great. (then again, they were doing fine all the time.) Internet services are up. We’re looking good. Finally.

Now of course, mind you, there were many other problems of which I didn’t even talk about since it’s about 3 to 4 am. Now everything is at about 99% up. Thank the gods!

Let’s recap, shall we?

1. Ascend/Lucent GRF 400 fails. Ascend/Lucent tries to steal our money. NO. Throw out the GRF and catch it on fire. Check.

2. Bad switch. Throw away, catch fire to Switch. Check.

3. Bad DC server. Rebuild, curse Microsoft.