OpenGear OOB modem issues...

N

ntba

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 28, 2005
Messages
185
Our (larger) company decided to get a bunch of OpenGear ACM5003-M OOB analog modem based console servers and we've run into a snag...

When dialing into most of North America(From within NA), we have no issues...When dialing into them anywhere below Mexico and Latin America we cannot get the modems to even handshake...as the line quality is so poor.

Has anyone had any experience with OOB management over large distances(multuiple countries or continents away)? We failed to take into account the distance our analog modems would be communicating.

Before you mention 3G cellular access, that would be too costly for the occasional OOB access to justify, but we still need it for the occasional site outage.

Any other products or workarounds? Even with our current console servers?
 
Try connecting at a lower baud rate.

If that doesn't work, how about over the Internet? A call to a local ISP (even in mexico) should be better than international.
 
Yeah we've been through all of this, even with OpenGear support...

-The line quality is so poor over 2 continents that the modems cannot handshake at 9600....or 2400 or....well anything

one time we got at low as 384 ???

The issue is the amount of A --> D conversions over the telco equiment that degrades the signal so much its essentially like going over a SIP trunk....

We called our MPLS provider ( AT&T) to see how they dial in to their euipment at our sites as this is how we got our idea to do this...site is down....dial in Ouit of Band...is it our router that's down?? NO? Call AT&T and open a ticket....YES? Better fix it before someone gets fired....

The thing is, AT&T has local offices and phone pools in each country so they don't have to go far whereas we have to sometimes traverse 4 or five countries to dial in.....

These OpenGears were mostly bought to help us migrate from our old MPLS provider to AT&T. When we're doing our cutovers we do them out of band for obvious reasons...Our workaround so far is to set up a local relay server or openger unit in the vicinty of the rest, typically in one main city for an entire country. Over the Network ---->OpenGear Relay--->dial in from there to another opengear...

This will work for now, but in the case that the main relay network connection goes down we lose visibility in that entire area...defeating the whole purpose of them.

I didn't think there was any other solution then this and you guys seem to have confirmed it..I guess the way we're doing it now will be good enough....and again 3G besides being too cost prohibitive is also very cumbersome to deal with....Thanks for your time guys :)
 
Maybe a temporary satellite internet connection that get passed from site to site as the cutovers progress?
 
We run OOB in most of our DCs with copper fast ethernet.
 
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