A lot of it was Marketing putting dates on things that shouldn't have had
dates on them yet. Likt taking the 'best case, this goes to beta and
is flawless first pass' approach. That, of course, didn't happen. And
some of it was engineers being a bit to optimistic.
>1. OSPF support for terminal servers and routers. This was originally
> scheduled for release in July (?) Now I see it as a feature of the
> announced but unreleased Portmaster 3 line but no mention of it
> for existing terminal server upgrades.
OSPF is in mid/late beta. It was dragging for a bit but there were a
number of recent updates to the code. The impression I have from talking
to the engineers is that they are doing some performance adjustments and
fine tuning for the most part, and fixing any problems the beta sites
report.
OSPF is the one engineering felt we'd have out in July or August. But
it hit snags in testing that slowed it down, and then it limboed while the
PM-3 was gestating. In the meantime we hired a new engineer who is
primarily focused on the routing code - OSPF, BGP(4), probably RIPv2 - and
the beta cycle is rolling again. Straight up - we tried to do too many
things at once without enough man power to sustain the load. When
projects were held up the schedule overflowed. We've been increasing the
engineering staff a great deal this past year, and now we have engineers
who focus on particular areas to help prevent the 'spread thin' issue.
Livingston is growing so fast sometimes we outstrip ourselves and have to
catch up.
>2. RADIUS 2.0, this was scheduled for release with the July Total Access
> CD(?) Free to existing customers.
Still free, now planned for this month. AFAIK there was one minor bug
recently uncovered that should be a couple line patch. The major wait is
the new RADIUS manual which is in final rewrite now.
>3. ChoiceNet, according to Press Releases in May, was available without
> charge to existing livingston customers and shipped with all new
> terminal servers and routers. We have gotten terminal servers since
> then from Solunet, no ChoiceNet, no sight of it on the web site either.
I honestly don't know what is up with this. I know the beta program has
been very active for several months now, and we have it working for demos
and have shown it at shows, etc. But I can't watch everything and I'm not
sure what the ship schedule is on this. Judging by the recent change in
tone in the documents it seems like it is getting close, they are starting
to hype it more which usually preceeds a release.
>open old wounds. It was a major letdown when the revised COMOS was
>announced. Too few changes to be a major revision (although the bug
You mean 3.3.3? That was a minor revision. the last major revision
was going from 3.1.4 to 3.3.1 - and that had *many* changes. The entire
code structure was redone.
-MZ
-- Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com For support requests: support@livingston.com <http://www.livingston.com/> Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566 See me in person: Internet Expo, Boston, MA, October 16-17, Booth 422 ;-)