I work in the networking industry and have a 19" rack in my home office. I've gotten tired of having to string serial cables across the room to a specific device in order to get a basic config on it.
I picked up Web Power Switch from digital-loggers.com to handle Ethernet-based power control. I also picked up an Avocent/Cyclades ACS32 serial console unit on eBay ($150-ish). They both work great, although I couldn't get console access to the Foundry / Brocade gear working.
I pulled out the user guides and through some trial and error finally figured it out. You'll need some DB9 Female to RJ45 Modular Adapters, and an "insertion and extraction" tool if your dongles have the pins already inserted.
You can use a standard CAT5 Ethernet cable for the RJ45-side of things. On the DB9 dongle, you'll want to map the following colors to these pins:
DB9 Pin - Color
1 - White (not needed)
2 - Yellow
3 - Black
4 - Orange (not needed)
5 - Red
6 - Brown (not needed)
7 - Blue
8 - Green
9 - no connection
The "not needed" lines came from the Foundry manuals. It looks like their serial console ports only need TX/RX CTS/RTS and GND. The other pins needed to go somewhere, and since I didn't want to cut them off, I just plugged them in the other ports randomly.
Now I can sit at my desk and power on a network device, remote console into it, give it a config, do my testing, and power it off again, all without having to leave my desk.
Hope that helps someone out there. Good luck!
0 comments