What Is Console Port ?

Posted by admin

January 11, 2009

Almost every networking device today have a console port. The main goal of console port is to establish an out-of-band connection in order to access the Command Line Interface to manage your networking device. Once you have finished the basic configuration on your device, assigning it IP address information can be easily done via its interfaces in order to manage your product in-band. To give you an example, Telnet, Web browser, SNMP etc are methods of in-band management.

We presume that you networking device, say for example cisco router ,has RJ-45 console port. You will need at least two components to manage it.

A: RJ-45 rollover cable

B: RJ-45-to-DB-9 or RJ-45-to-DB-25 terminal adapter (generally determined by number of pins on the COM port of your PC)

If in case your router has DB-25 console port, you then require DB-25-to-RJ-45 modem adapter which gets plugged into the the console port of the router.

The rollover cable is similar to Ethernet CAT-5 cable in appearance. However you may face difficulties while using this cable for other type of Ethernet connections as it is proprietary to cisco. The rollover cable has eight wires and two RJ-45 connectors at each end. The pin in rollover cable is connected to some different pin at other end. Pin 1 on one side is mapped to pin 8 on the other side; pin 2 is mapped to pin 7, pin 3 is mapped to pin 6, pin 4 is mapped to pin 5, pin 5 is mapped to pin 4, pin 6 is mapped to pin 3, pin 7 is mapped to pin 2, and pin 8 is mapped to pin 1.

Once you are done with connecting one end of the rollover cable to the console port of your networking device and other to the terminal adapter and finally into COM port of your PC, you are geared up to configure your PC to access the networking device. To do this you also require terminal emulation package. One product which is readily available is Hyper Terminal, which comes standard with Microsoft Windows operating systems. With help of terminal emulation software, you need to set parameters (though not comprehensive )as detailed below.

Speed : 9,600bps

Data bits: 8

Stop bits: 1

Parity: None

Flow control: None

Once settings are configured, press ENTER Key for couple of time to gain access to Commnad Line Interface(CLI).

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