Thursday, October 25, 2018

When did OpenGear become such a bad company?

I am heading up a pretty sizable network project for a fortune 100 company, that requires we network large geographic areas. Seeing how I didn’t want to drive/fly hundreds of miles, I purchased about two dozen OpenGear console switches and they have been a pretty big disaster. Had a lot of luck with them a few years ago, and they used to have a reputation for good service.

Basically, there is a pretty obvious bug when using SFP uplinks where upon reboot, they just don’t come up. If you console into them and issue an IFCONFIG there is no IP under the interface or bond. The only fix is multiple hard reboots, it even weirder, removing and reinserting the fiber. Shut/No shut on the Cisco uplink side has about a 10% of working. If you bond the interfaces it’s even worse. We replicated this issue on six different devices.

It took us seriously 6-7 tickets, three RMAs, and and dozens of emails before their support would even admit the issue. I was told it was everything from us purchasing suspicious SFPs, which were genuine OpenGear and Cisco, to that we needed to wipe the switches with an unpublished command. Their tech support refuses to do any sort of troubleshooting except “run the show command” and then we wait for several days. This has been going on for months.

I find it pretty hard to believe I’m the first guy ever who rebooted a console switch with an SFP and had this issue. I’ve reached out to their sales begging for help and have gotten zero replies. Our reseller is frankly shocked at how they are acting.

On top of this we had two dead RMAs. Also, their central management software, LightHouse, won’t take the license we received, but I don’t have the energy right now for that one. I’m sure their support will be right on that.

I really want to like this product, but I’m at my wits end. Any advice? Also a fair warning, stay away from their product for a bit.



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