My experience with Livingston PortMasters was a great experience. PortMasters,
Cisco 2511 w/Octopus cables, and lots of US Robotics modems encompassed my early
ISP experiences.
If I recall correctly, Livingston came up with the RADIUS authentication
protocol, and open-sourced it for us all to enjoy.
Lots of fun with RADIUS and TACACS in its various forms. I have not had the
opportunity to work with the DIAMETER protocol yet.
Thanks for sharing.
Jerry
On 08/ 7/16 10:28 PM, Jim Brain wrote:
No questions, and nothing of interest, but a quick
story of success.
Not sure if PortMasters are on topic or not, but I picked a 20 port unit up at
VCF-SE #2 in 2014 and it has sat on my shelf for 2 years as I tried to find a
large block of time to get it working. Having never used a unit in the past, I
somewhat dreaded the learning curve.
Circumstances forced it to be moved, and I thought last night, instead of just
putting it back, I'd try to get it going. Grabbed a null modem cable, gender
changer, plugged into port 0, fired it up, started a term, and almost
immediately got to a prompt! A quick dload of the PortMaster config guide,
logging in as !root without a password, and I was in.
Some of it was luck (the Port 0 was in console mode, and my term just happened
to be at 9600 bps, 8N1), but having the docs easily accessible and not requiring
a special Windows App or some other nonsense was half the battle. 20 minutes
later, I had the unit configured to accept incoming direct connections from old
equipment, with my userid set to no password with functionality to prompt for
the server name upon login.
That was awesome.
On the other hand, after the 2e was up, I started investigating the AWAN 3883
Terminal Server I had lying here. Web sources and config guides kept pointing
me to a Windows App to configure, and it looks to need adapters to connect to
RS232 (not as big a deal, but still a irritant), so I put it in my pile to give
away.
Jim