We got a new Sun E220R at work a few days ago. I finally powered it up today, though I had some trouble getting the serial console going, which leads to my query.. I acquired a cable (female DB9 to male DB25) that was labeled as a null modem cable and set up minicom to run at 9600, 8N1. Nothing happened. Finally, after digging all over the place for another cable, I gave up and connected that cable to another cable -- supposedly a printer extension (female DB25 to male DB25) -- and everything worked! This makes me wonder a few things. First, the serial port on a normal Sun box is a female DB25. On a PC, OTOH, it's usually a male DB9 or DB25. Why is that? It seems to imply that you don't need a null modem cable to connect a PC to a Sun, though PC<->PC and Sun<->Sun still need null modem cables. Is that true? Secondly, why would it suddenly start working with a printer cable in the middle? I guess I had left the cable disconnected for a few minutes while I was digging around, so could the port have somehow reset while nothing was connected to it? Oh yeah.. This is labeled Off Topic, though the first thing I did once I got to a console was to install Debian ;-) -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Never let school get in / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ the way of your \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) education. -- Mark Twain [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20010612/c52b4455/attachment.pgp