Managing your network devices via console

Dylan Ebner dylan.ebner at crlmed.com
Fri May 15 18:04:47 UTC 2009


We use Cyclades (avocent) devices in our data center. They have worked
great for us. Very reliable. Modem dial-in gives us great remote
capabilities if we have a major outage. We had troubles initially
getting them to work because the cable adapters were never pinned
correctly for Cisco. We ended up making our own rolled rj45-rj45 cables.
IIRC, this was a ton of work as you need to do some funky 2 wires in one
position stuff. 

We also use Cisco 2500's with modem on the aux and an octo-cable for the
devices. This works well too, but not as nice of an interface as the
Cyclades. No special cables needed though.

For power we have been using APC Managed PDU's. These have been
fantastic. No compaints.

 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mehmet Akcin [mailto:mehmet at akcin.net] 
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 9:30 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Managing your network devices via console

Hello,

It's always cool to have console access to routers/switches and nowadays
they are going from RS-232 to RJ-45 as a standart. I have got Avocent
DSR 2035 which is a KVM+Serial console (all in one).. but while I was
able to have it work against servers via KVM or/and Serial , I was
unable to make it work properly against any network device. I am
wondering if anyone had experience on DSR or similar boxes to configure
them against network devices console ports.

Making suggestions for alternative ways of centralizing network device
console management is also more than welcome, I guess the old fashioned
server attached usb-serial console is one of the most preferred way, but
feel free to provide if  you have good ideas

cheers

--
Mehmet






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