On 14 Oct 2002, Mike Hicks wrote: > 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? Not exactly the answer you're looking for, but you can always get it set up and manage it via SNMP/SSH/whatever your specific vendor supports.. -- Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.real-time.com | Fax : (952)943-8500