[snip] Warning. only the end of this is truly relevant to nanog, IMO. Clobber the message now if you want to avoid a mini-rant about ascend. I'm a right tool for the right job person myself, so I'm glad that people have found ascends to work for them, but I have to interrupt the love-in long enough to point out - the grf is not all of ascend. maybe they finally got things right? - ascend CPE equipment is constantly shipped with incorrect cables - ascend CPE equipment has poor design on the human-interface and the electrics. That is, people will, can and do plug the wrong cable into the wrong port which in turn fries the unit. They have a very smooth RMA process, which says something about how often it has to be used. - software-of-the-week releases that are rife with regression faults - nigh-abandonment of product with no warning: see software version 5.x for the p400 series? see it coming anytime soon? All that said, we have had good luck with scend on the higher-end gear, MAXes et al, so maybe the GRF is done right. But that's a co$tly "maybe". Lastly, the bit that's really relevant, how to the GRF-users automate things in their networks? I'll cast a hairy eyeball on claims that "cisco-free" is a good thing until I see other products that give high flexibility on route tuning and a method to programatically alter configs. Asking for vendors to have a common programatic interface is a bit much to ask, so I'll settle for sane, regexp-parsable files... Disclaim, disclam; affiliation, not representation; etc etc. Joe -- Joe Provo, Network Architect 800.763.8111 x3006 Network Operations Center Fax 508.229.2375 UltraNet Communications, Inc. <jprovo@ultra.net>