Since my computer has not serial port, the serial cable is of no help. Does the Catalyst 2940 acquire an address via DHCP? At least my DHCP server doesn't show any address which has been requested recently.
Maybe the Catalyst has to be reset first? I bought it second hand, so I don't know how it is configured right now.
I am a total newbie to Cisco products.
Best Answer
Word to the wise, don't connect a second hand switch to your production network before you wipe and/or re-configure it. Doing so can cause you MAJOR headaches if your network happens to use VTP. Without getting into the gritty details, connecting it could wipe or modify the VTP database used on your network (holding list of VLANs}, and basically cause your network to stop working.
And to answer your question, exactly as ewwhite said. You can get a usb-serial cable and console in that way. If you don't know the current password you can hold the mode button at boot to enter rommon mode and either wipe the config or change the password.