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
--
Jim Brain
brain at
jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com