Connecting to a cisco device with a PortServer II 16

Serial Servers & Infrastructure Mangement Portserver TS
1

I have inheirited an older PortServer II 16 port device from one of our Telco’s. Of course, they have no documentation with it. I am trying to get it configured so that I can connect to my cisco devices. I have made a cable from some specs that I have found on the web and I have configured an IP on my portserver. I can telnet to it, but havent figured out how to connect to each port. Any suggestions?

2

If you’re trying to console your Cisco devices, you’d want to set the ports on the Portserver II as device type “prn” as follows:

  1. login as root, default pw: dbps
  2. set ports range=## dev=prn auto=off
    (* can be used with range to set all ports)
  3. you may also need to set additional parameters such as line parameters and flow control. Do “set line ?” or “set flow ?” to see what your options are, and set them appropriately.
  4. boot action=reset (this will reboot the Portserver II)

To telnet to a Cisco console connected to port 1 of your Portserver II, you would use the following syntax:

telnet 2001

Note that the TCP port used in the preceding example equates to the TCP Base Socket (2000 by default) + Port #

3

I have set the dev to prn and auto to off

when i telnet to port 2001, i just get the standard
Trying X
Connected to X
Escape character is ‘^]’.

but never get to the console port on the cisco
here is my port settings for port 1
1 vt100 prn 4 0 1 off off 0 0 0.0.0.0

and flow settings
1 on off on off off on off off off off off off

and line
1 9600 8 N 1 ignore null off off off offe settings

my cable is a cat 5 cable with the following pinout

portserver ---------- cisco
1 orange brown
2 brown brown/white
3 blue green
4 green blue/white
5 green/white blue
6 blue/white green/white
7 brown/white orange
8 orange/white orange/white

i got that pinout from
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ajkunen/wiring.html#WMAP4

4

duh, i flipped my cable and its working fine now