Serial connection for Powerconnect 5324

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
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Nov 29, 2009
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I just bought this switch off Ebay and I can't seem to find anything online on the physical connection of this switch. It's not like normal switches where it just uses a ethernet type cable that goes to serial, it requires a female to female cable which does not exist anywhere so I ended up buying a gender changer for a normal cable I had but can't seem to get the prompt to come up. I'm using 9600, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bits and no flow control. Do some wires have to be crossed a special way or something or do I need to type anything special in the console to get the prompt? I can't find much online on this switch. At least not as far as serial connectivity goes.
 
From what I'm reading a null cable is crossed over right? So what I have is straight through so it wont work.

Looks like I'll have to make another online order. I should have asked if it came with the cable. I'll have to check at work though I might be able to get one. I work at a telco CO, there has to be a null cable in this building somewhere I can at least borrow. :p

I could cut this cable and reroute the wires but I rather keep it in tact since I know as a fact I'll end up needing it in the future and then not have it.
 
it is indeed a null modem, i have this switch myself. i think its a piece of junk but till i can afford to repair or replace my cisco switch i'm stuck with it.
 
Found the proper cable! I'm at the console now, just started messing with it. It's indeed very similar to Cisco, I think I will catch on pretty quick. It's been a while since I've worked with cisco but I was half decent at it. The question mark and tab are your friends. :D

I was also thinking, how are people normally connect to serial devices now days if they don't have an old laptop/computer around? No new PC comes with a serial port now, and USB ones tend to be flaky. I'm lucky enough that I have my work laptop here but if ever they ask for it back I wont have a way to connection serially to anything.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I was also thinking, how are people normally connect to serial devices now days if they don't have an old laptop/computer around?
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LOL adapters man, adapters. There are adapters for everything and I've seen some ridiculous dongles just to get compatibility on older devices. Entire companies have made miniature fortunes off such a business :p.
 
I've never had issues with USB to serial adapters. Then again I but the decent quality ones.
 
Got it setup mostly how I want now, mostly will be default vlan1 for everything then vlan 2 for wireless. I just set 6 ports on vlan2 for now. One for uplink to firewall's external interface, the WAP, one for the jack on my work bench (I don't like putting foreign computers on my main network) and the other 4 as spares.

Now, I just want to make sure I'm understanding this vlan thing right. My firewall has 2 LAN interfaces, one for internal network, one for wireless/public. I have a few rules where the public network can access parts of the private one like my hvac control web page (which I should probably set a password on lol). Private LAN will be plugged to port 1 of the switch which is vlan1, so anything else plugged into that will be going out to the firewall's private interface. I also have the public interface plugged into port 19 of the switch which is set to vlan 2, so any other ports on vlan 2 will go through that interface and is completely isolated (at layer 2) from vlan 1.

Is that correct? Now I know I could also make a trunking port on the firewall and switch so that the vlans are trunked through a single cable, but for now I'll leave it at that. I may still make those two cables trunking so I can have more vlans, but for now it will stay physically separate. Is this an ok way of doing it? I'm using pfsense for the firewall, which I believe does support vlans. In the future I may simply get rid of the external interface and make another vlan but I'll keep it like this for now as it works.

I just want to make sure these two networks are indeed physically (well at layer 2) separate and there is no way someone could get onto the other whether by plugging something into a port or by accessing a resource on one. Now that I have a managed switch I will start to make use of vlans more and for better security so I can segregrate stuff. Will be better once I upgrade my VM server to something with more PCI slots so I can add more NICs. I can bridge VMs to various vlans and stuff.

This thing is getting loud in here, it needs to go in the rack, now that SSH works. :p
 
Put just the ports you need in the appropriate vlans and "park" the vlans in an unused vlan or just shut them off. For home use though, there's no need to be that secure. No ones going to come in and plug something in without you knowing.
 

And if yes I have bigger issues. :p

I might still play with mac security for kicks though, but yeah way overkill. But if I can... why not. :p
 
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