Livingston PortMaster 2e

[Jerry Kemp]

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
>