Has anyone come up with a good way of managing access points strewn all
across a building through their console ports?  I suppose the easiest
thing to do is just carry a laptop or a PDA around and connect it to the
APs, but it would obviously be really nice to do centralized management.

It looks to me like one of the simpler ways to do it would be to have
each AP have an RS-232<->RS-422 adapter on it, then get a multiport
serial card that can speak RS-422 (or get a -232 card and twice as many
converters), and put it in a management PC somewhere.

Of course, each media converter runs on the order of $60, multiport
serial cards run in the hundreds of dollars, and cable doesn't seem to
be all that cheap (though I suppose you could probably run the signal
over Cat5 in a pinch..)

So, I guess you could do a dozen APs for the price of a decent laptop,
but considering the low speeds used with serial consoles and the
infrequent need to use them, are there any good tricks for doing this
cheaper?

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Is it true cannibals don't
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   eat clowns because they
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  taste funny?
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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