I figured a dedicated topic to this software would be good. Perhaps all the customers can have some sort of place to talk about their experiences / knowledge of the software. Here’s the last post I made in the “Cap Limits” thread.
Update:
I’ve been in contact with PowerCode and John for the last month. Things SEEM to be rolling along nicely. The software still isn’t 100 percent (maybe 70) and you will be a beta tester still at this point if you sign on. I would like to see some sort of lower prices still for signing on as this will not do what it says on the website. Especially in our case where many aspects of the software is geared towards the US. (Zip codes, 9 digit bank numbers, gateway provider requires you to open up a US bank account to process bank accounts, etc.)
Another one of my gripes is that you have to implement a imagestream router at each tower to have many of the settings take effect. Because we were on a terrible network design before I am hesitant to route everyone through the router so I split the router into a different vlan and I am moving people gradually until everyone is on it. Although I’m still not in love with the solution it’s going along okay. I still wonder why they don’t use SNMP for calculating bandwidth. Here’s a response I got from one of the support techs at powercode.
"With snmp you have total counts on anything, pings ,any sort of traffic, that hits the device causes a counter to go up…If you an isp, you may not want things like pings, snmp querys, visiting internal servers, to count towards the customers bandwidth, therefore the bmu watches what goes in and out to the internet from it…Then you have an accurate count of how much bandwidth a customer has used in and out to the net… As for how it works its simple…When you create, say, a service plan for the customer , lets say 1.5 by 1.5Megabits, powercode takes the ip address on the account, creates a tc class(traffic control) class and all traffic destined and originating from that ip address is filtered through that class, this class has counters, they both go up, one is download and ones is upload, powercode uses this to get its stats… Your verry right about snmp, however, sometimes its a pain to get the info you want from it…ie oid strings…they are not all the same for the info you want to gather, We do our best, but for things like ,say canopy… the oid string for what you want almost changes every firmware release… Imagine having your snmp bandwidth gathering broken when you do an update…pain…ip is simple… "
I pretty much disagree with him but whatever. I can’t see SNMP polling or pings adding that much to the tally. In fact I did a little calculation. If you ping the SM with 32bytes every second for a month it only comes out to 79MB. This would also let us not run through the router and still collect bandwidth stats. Updating the UUID also doesn’t seem like it would be a big hassle and it’s not like you’re going to be upgrading your canopy network to the latest version as soon as it comes out. I’m still not 100 percent impressed but I’ll keep you all updated on the situation.
thatoneguysteve wrote: www.powercode.com/support
is the dedicated powercode forum
Except registering doesn't do anything because they never approve accounts. Also this isn't really so much tech support as just seeing what everyones experiences are.
I jumped ship on this company back when they were still known only as PowerNOC. We had many bad experiences with their tech support department. I don’t know that I would ever consider their software given my past experiences and what you’ve shared with us.
You have a whole lot more patience than I do!
RyanR wrote: [quote="thatoneguysteve":215zsfd1]www.powercode.com/support
is the dedicated powercode forum
Except registering doesn't do anything because they never approve accounts. Also this isn't really so much tech support as just seeing what everyones experiences are.[/quote:215zsfd1]
It does now, its a matter of getting users back to it. I need the guys that know the tweaks. Their tech support is hard to deal with, I even have the presidents cell phone number and dont make very fast progress, butt here is progress.
I’m not sure what to tell you, I registered a few months back and my account is still in the “approval pending” stages.
Edit: Nevermind it seems to be working now. I never recieved an email about approval so I don’t know.
They probably read the forum here heh…
We acquired their product when we acquired another wisp. I have to say, it’s meh. I love their product for the database functionality. I wish they made a PowerNOC release that was JUST the database and billing (ip management and billing functionality). I don’t even use the really anymore, there are maybe 20 or less customers on the BMU.
I hate running subs through a computer-based router/bridge. I don’t trust it one bit.
amd phreak wrote: They probably read the forum here heh...
We acquired their product when we acquired another wisp. I have to say, it's meh. I love their product for the database functionality. I wish they made a PowerNOC release that was JUST the database and billing (ip management and billing functionality). I don't even use the really anymore, there are maybe 20 or less customers on the BMU.
I hate running subs through a computer-based router/bridge. I don't trust it one bit.
That's exactly my thinking. I'm doing it through vlans so at the very least if it bombs and blows up I can quickly move everyone back to a different vlan and get new addresses so they still have internet. Another reason why I would love SNMP based monitoring instead of IP through the router. God please please please do this.
We are not using the BMU yet as I seem to have issues getting the DHCP server to work. I already know what the issue is and it is self inflicted but manually going through a flat file to find ip address typos from the last 4 years is driving me nuttzo.
Their billing and account management is great. I do know that I will be keeping my MT router in play as my actual edge router just in case.
anthonyw wrote: We are not using the BMU yet as I seem to have issues getting the DHCP server to work. I already know what the issue is and it is self inflicted but manually going through a flat file to find ip address typos from the last 4 years is driving me nuttzo.
Their billing and account management is great. I do know that I will be keeping my MT router in play as my actual edge router just in case.
Good luck with DHCP, it fails fairly consistently, just stops working, occasionally taking bandwidth management down with it. We Primarily use the DHCP for IP management, we assign the customer the DHCP address but hard set it in their router.