Home lab - how does this sound?

oli356

astrogeek wrote: »

I'd be willing to bet the USB-serial adapters you got are the same crappy ones I bought, (mine are blue, with silver, glittery cables). These are very finicky in Windows, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, however they work much better in Linux. The serial card should be much better, but you will need to physically move the console cable to a different switch/router when you want to console into something differently. You could simply telnet around, but this requires everything to have a working connection and a lot of what you will probably be doing in your labs are breaking connections, so you will really want console access to you devices.

This is why a lot of people use an old router such as a 2511 as a terminal server, this would be connected to all of your devices console ports and then you just connect to that terminal server to get into your lab. I just received a Digi CM 32 console server in the mail and so far I really like it, plus it was cheaper than if I had bought a 2511 console server.

The password recovery is a very useful thing to know how to do on a router or switch, same with upgrading the IOS. It doesn't matter if it has a username/password and an enable password, the password recovery process will bypass both. Just don't forget to do a copy-run-start before rebooting, or you'll have to do it all over.

That sounds like the cable yeah, rubbish. The serial card is at least working (I now understand why when i was doing work experience last year the network admin kept several old dell laptops with serial ports built in). At the moment I'm working through ICND2 CBT nugget videos and following that lab, so I can telnet around currently.. But at the start when I was constantly changing what the rollover was plugged into it was a pain.
I just had a quick look at the 2511 on ebay and it's really expensive Like the cost of half of my lab at least...

Not sure if I did the correct way of password recovery, power off switch, hold down the mode button until the SYS light went off I think it was. Type in flash_init and then one or two other commands... When looking how to do it some mentioned the ROMmon mode which I never saw the prompt for.

oli356

alxx wrote: »

The ftdichip based usb2serial work great with windows , linux and mac.
Use a lot of them at home and work.

Can get them from easy sync USB to RS232
or in Australia from dontronics USB Converters - Dontronics

The ftdi based usb to can and rs422/485 converters also work very well.

For cheap console cables you can get them for $2.60 shipped from HongKong.

The pci serial cards can work nicely but also be a pain with windows.
The cheap ones seem to work better with linux.

Same price as the PCI card really, I have 2 serial ports on the back of this PCI card, only using one though.