Home lab: is my switch defect?

calle

Hello all,

I am currently studying for CCENT, and trying to build a small home lab.

Today, I picked up my first piece of cisco equipement, a 2900XL for 40eur from a local second hand store.

But when I pplugged the power cable, after booting, it never stopped scrolling down, showing random messages.
I made a video screen capture here
Dailymotion - Cisco 2900xl switch problem - une vidéo Hi-Tech et Science

Now, I've tried with a different telnet client, I checked that no keyboard keypress was sent to the computer, and when I try to type something, have no response on screen whatsoever.


The switch didn't come with a console cable, and since it's saturday and I wanted to start working with it straight away, I made one based on the pinout info found here.
Cisco Console (9) cable pinout and signals @ pinouts.ru

Maybe I did something wrong with the cable and that's what's causing the problem.

Any Ideas of what could be wrong? did I buy a defect unit?

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Calle.

tiersten

You've got RX and TX shorted together on your cable.

calle

YES!
It was as simple as that. should've checked it though.

Thanks a lot.

Calle

/usr

You've got RX and TX shorted together on your cable.

I take it you've encountered that problem before? Good call!

tiersten

/usr wrote: »

I take it you've encountered that problem before? Good call!

I've never had the problem before with Cisco gear but I've previously done a lot of work in design and development of embedded devices.

You can work out that it is shorted together somewhere because you can see the boot messages being entered into the initial config prompt. The switch is buffering the input and just processing it a line at a time.

mikej412

Plus it almost always turns out to be the home made cable.