I have two Netgear SRW224G4P switches with serial console ports. I'm using a Sabrent USB 2.0 to serial cable adapter with a female-to-female serial cable. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit and using putty to connect. However, nothing appears in the console window. I do not get a "press enter to begin" message, and if I press ender, nothing happens. There is no jibberish in the console window to signify the wrong baud rate. If I pull the power on the switches and let them start back up, I do not see any POST information.
The serial settings I'm using: COM3, 38400 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, parity off, flow control XON/XOFF.
As a comparison, I had all of this working with a different model switch–a Netgear SRW224P, so I know the cables are good, and putty is functional.
Is there a trick to connecting to a SRW224G4P switch's console port?
[edit]: I also tried the baud rates of 2400, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, and 31250. None of these rates seemed to work and all I got was a blank, unresponsive screen in the console.
Best Answer
Flow control should be off - chaper 4 page 7 http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/linksys-SRW224G4P-manual.pdf
I've used both hyperterminal and putty for this.
Also I remember having some fun and games with a SRW248G4P - whatever I did I couldn't connect - tried a straight through cable, then modified it to cross over, then changed it to cisco rollover. However the cable didn't have all the pins populated so that possibly could have been the reason.
Luckily I found a flaw with the SRW248's - they would only operate at around 20Mb per port rather than 100Mb with certain NIC's so Cisco swapped it out for an SF300-48P. Again I tried my home made cable with no joy but the cable supplied with the replacement worked fine.
I've found a website that says it's just a normal straight through cable, but often cables aren't fully populated and I'm wondering if this could be an issue. http://techpain.blogspot.com/2009/06/linksys-console-settings-srw224g4.html
Also if you get no joy, see if you can use a proper serial port reather than usb converter.
As a side note, I very strongly recommend you do some testing of the switch - Get a server with decent RAID setup on to one of the gig ports, and some time when the server is under no/little load, copy a file from different PC's plugged into the 100Mb ports and see what happens.
With certain NIC's, I found speed dropped to 20% which could be improved to around 70% by turning on flow control on the switch, but after a short period this would cause lots of ports to stop working.
Cisco wished to verify the fault in their lab before acknowledging the fault - took a while for us to establish what common kit we had that would reproduce the issue - in the end we used Realtek 8139B with drivers updated to latest to prove the issue. The did swap both of ours free of charge although we had to pay postage to get our old ones sent to Belgium.
If you can get them to swap yours out, not only will this get it working at full speed, you will no longer have to wait half an hour for each GUI page to load.