At 02:28 AM 10/18/96 -0500, you wrote:

In message <199610180717.AAA16438@netservice.ca.navigist.com>, "Joe Rhett" writ es:

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But you can't get one engineer to hack something into the router code for you on just his say-so anymore. But once you could. I dunno maybe you still can, but I think you have to have megabucks behind you to do it.

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Yes, you can, but you have to do it under the table and via direct contacts. And a bottle of cask strength single malt will help. ;-)

You know, I find it hard to think of this as a feature - especially given the number of times the "quick hack" broke something else. And it's always missing the next release of the software.

It takes an Act of God to get Bay to release a fix - but it works when they release it, and it works in the next full release too.

I know of a bunch of very useful things that originated this way that are in production code on my cisco boxes now. If sprint had been in a situtation where they need a new feature X in order to make the network run at all, because no one had designed they network to grow like it did, I'd hate to have bought Bay and not be able to get a timely fix.

I would definately ask my router vendor hard questions about how quickly a fix will be released assuming I have a "network down" condition.

Bay generally releases fixes every few weeks. For a "network down" situation, if releasing a workspace immediately is the right thing to do, then that's what we do. Who makes the call? The customer, after receiving input from the Bay engineering team. Michael