Systems Enhancement Corporation Power Administrator 800 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

6 Jun 2003

Of course there is no "standard" 9-pin serial connector, except what has
become standard just by virtue of mass usage on the PC. The original IBM PC
had standard 25 pin connectors of course. Even that serial port was not a
standard RS232, since the RS232 standard also has a second serial link on
pins 14 and 16, along with all the control signals for the secondary link,
which the PC didn't have (as far as I'm aware). I've never seen an RS232
comms link fully populated and used to the standard though!

It is unlikely that any other equipment would conform to the PC world's
9-pin 'standard' unless it is quite new. Most recent test equipment tends to
use the 25 pin connector if it has a serial port at all. The standard for
test equipment (and probably UPSs as well) is GPIB (IEEE-488) which is
parallel.

paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Tothwolf [mailto:tothwolf@concentric.net]
Sent: 05 June 2003 21:22
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: RE: Systems Enhancement Corporation Power Administrator 800

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Feldman, Robert wrote:

...
  It might be that the DE-9's don't have a
standard PC serial pinout. At
 work, we have a UPS that uses a DE-9 for programming, but the pinout on
 the cable (a 940-0024C; Googling produces a number of hits) is

 Female 	Male
 1-4
 2------------2
 3------------1
 5------------6
 6 NC
 7-8
 9 NC 
Let me guess...APC? :)

Their ports are very fun, since if you plug in a standard serial cable,
and open the port, it can turn off the UPS. The UPS' port supports both a
dump-mode DTR/RTS/etc signaling as well as a smart-mode.

The cable above is their "smart" cable. The 1-4 and 7-8 connections are
also not needed if you are not using 3rd party software such as NUT, as
they are just loop back connections.

-Toth