Livingston PortMaster 2e

[Jim Brain]

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