We've been stalled on a (trivial) deployment issue for the configs on the VoIP hardware since launching a week ago. Can't for love or money get the stupid things to update automatically. Spent the whole day trying to coax them into doing the update (and eventually just laying out the pathology in the hopes of seeing the problem, and after that failed, planning how to eliminate the problem manually, which is going to require recalling them (grr)).

The fact is, all the behavior that's annoying me is probably just the firmware in the MTA (software), but it just feels hardware-ish. It just won't tell me what's going wrong, no way to see a log of what failed, no way to tell whether the problem is one of the MTA being unhappy with something (e.g. rejecting for reasons of security) or of not understanding something (e.g. how to interpret a setting or how to encode/decode it). It doesn't even bother to tell you whether it was successful or not, you have to imply it from changes in parameters.

Maybe I should clarify the statement to "consumer hardware makes for very frustrating days" instead... That makes it more obviously a universal truth behind which I can rally the massing hordes. "Give us feedback mechanisms or take your shoddy cr^p back!" shall ring out as our battle cry. We will storm the walls of the VoIP hardware castles and demand satisfaction.