Getting a Sun Ultra 5 To Work

A few jobs back, where I spent about 10 years, I spent tons of time on interfacing various pieces of equipment. A popular application was serial<->ethernet as many people brought use-to-be serial-only applications online to utilize the available network connections, especially inter-building and across WANs/VPNs. While the network portion was my specialty and reason for being there, I would always get dragged into troubleshooting serial connections, and became pretty good at doing so. Asking the customer if his device is a DTE or a DCE is useless. Besides the fact that the answer only provides limited information anyway, customers always guess and almost always get it wrong. It became a joke amongst people in support that you should assume the opposite of what they tell you. Getting both the pinout AND directions of the signal from a reliable source (usually from the manufacturer of the equipment) was the only surefire way of knowing how to interface to it. There are some manufacturers who would use the hardware control leads to communicate information (more than just for flow-control). Was it maybe the programming interface for Motorola radios? Keith