Dell Switches, Digi Console Servers and Linux Serial Ports

4 Jul 2009

What a day… So we have a fancy new(new to us) Dell 6000 series switch, a 6224 actually. As it turns out, our typical remote serial solution won’t work with this switch. Normally we’ll connect the console port of these switches to a Digi Passport Server. The network has 2 entry points, so if we need to work on any device that may cause an outage at either entry point, we have options to maintain connectivity.

At any rate, this sweet little 6000 series switch works fine connected to a PC, but through the Digi we get no love. What does Dell say? Dell says it should be exactly like all of our 5000 series switches and there should be no change in Digi pinouts, they also said, if it doesn’t work now, it never will. Whatever that means.. Well this of course creates a dilemma, we need to modify this thing and it is definitely going to drop the network.

So the short term solution is using a linux box that is connected to one of our entry points. Basically we just plugged the Dell console cable into the serial port of this server. After that you can just use screen from a terminal window to make it all go.

Once you have the Dell console cable connected, open a terminal window to the server that is hooked to the Dell(or whatever device). If you haven’t used sceen before, it’s really quite simple, basically, in your terminal window type the following command:

screen /dev/ttyS0 9600

This opens a console connection to the dell through your serial port at 9600 baud. Once you are in here, it’s life as normal, it’s getting out where you’ll need to know a little about screen.

The easiest way to bail out of this connection is the following sequence:
CTRL + A
K (SHIFT + K)

This will open a dialog at the bottom of the window asking if you are sure that you want to kill this window. Answer ‘y’ and you are back to your original terminal window.

Dat’s it.