Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
How APC and AdTran ruined my day
A COM cable is a COM cable is a COM cable, right? Well, for the record, the 9-pin COM cable connectors APC ships with it’s UPS units does not have a connection on all nine pins.
You may want to remember this when you are looking for a COM cable to use to make a console connection to a router to do the initial config, and you get really confused that you can connect and see all the router’s bootstrap info fly-by, but can get the darn thing to accept input from your terminal.
You may want to remember this before you spend a long time on the phone with the router company’s tech support and before you spend an hour trying to make sure all your encoding setting are right in your terminal application.
Also, on a related note, you may want to submit a comment to AdTran that it’s very confusing to have an option to reset a router to “factory-defaults” when, in fact, the factory defaults are not how it was configured as you received the unit from the factory — and therefore not compatible with the quick-start instructions you provide…thus requiring console connections to the unit to set it up.
