[ale] Share my frustration: what do you do for fax/data modems?

[Christopher Fowler]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 18:32 -0400, Howard A Story wrote:
> Not to plug Multi-tech but I love there customer support on their 
> products.  And the Modems are made for commercial use.  Last time I 
> looked they had a 10 year warranty. 

That must have been a few years back.  I still agree on the quality.
The best modems I ever worked with.  I disagree on support.  I think
that MT has suffered in recent years and their Linux knowledge has
gotten worse and worse.  When I ran into problems with their modem and
they were basically no help to me.  I did what I've learned.  In the end
the only person you can rely on is you.  You're the top of the chain.  I
modified the driver myself to get it to work.  

I recently ran into a problem with another vendor.  I had to wait for
their consultant to find time in his schedule to work on my problem.
This is what happens when you hire external help to write your code.
You internal team has no clue.  It took 4 weeks to make the driver
compile under 2.6.16.  And to stop barfing on the console every time the
tty was closed.  And for a while before this problem I had to disable
SMP because if would barf and die if SMP was enabled.  We buy _many_
boards from them too.