| MANAGED SWITCHES AND VINTAGE PCS Managing a Managed Switch with a vintage PC....mayhbe to put my vintage PC's on their own VLAN? |
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It should be little surprise that I like to dabble in networking quite a bit. It also should be little surprise anything with a "console" intrigues me. So here, we're going to talk a little about managed switches (and I'm going to try and make sure to document it for my own personal use here).
Console Cables & Using The Console One thing I don't think people realize, that is a huge difference from say, a Linksys Gigabit household switch, and something you'd find on the job, say a Cisco Catalyst or something similar, is that managed switches have their own Operating System. In the case of Cisco, this is their iOS - no, not that Apple one on iPads and iPhones - a different "iOS", which is command-line driven, like DOS, or Linux, but has it's own purpose, managing the switch. On Vintage PC's, we are lucky, because we have a legacy port that has classically been intended for the switch - COM ports, or Serial Ports,or 1/0/1/0/1/0 ports...this is where the DB-9 end of an old style console cable connects. On the switch end, we have a RJ45 connector, identical to those found on both ends of your aveage Ethernet cable - this connects to the switch on the end marked "console". Now, the oldskool way of consoling into the switch, is to setup your COM Port settings accordingly. For this initial run, I used Windows 3.11 Terminal. This meant setting the port to 9600 baud, 8 bits, 1 bit, no stop, no auto flow control, and then power on the switch (stick the cable into it) - and you'll start to see the boot text scroll down the screen. |