So you know Ezra Moore.  Ezra and I are working on a wireless Coffee
Shop empire.  I think he told you about it.  

I've been reading your posts for over a year.  It's good to know that
you're a brother.

PS.  I'd go to the monthly meetings if they weren't Tuesday nights.  I
have school and service meeting.

Jacob Behm

-----Original Message-----
From: steve ulrich [mailto:sulrich at botwerks.org] 
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 3:34 PM
To: tcwug-list at tcwug.org
Subject: Re: [TCWUG] Access Point management


given that most APs aren't necessarily always within reach of a
serial interface most of them are addressable on the the network.  is
there some specific reason that you don't want to manage yours over
the network? 

for the number of times that you need to hook up to an AP via the
serial cable i can't imagine that lugging a laptop around is all that
difficult.  

when last we saw our hero (Monday, Oct 14, 2002), 
 Mike Hicks was madly tapping out:
> Has anyone come up with a good way of managing access points strewn
> all across a building through their console ports?  I suppose the
> easiest thing to do is just carry a laptop or a PDA around and
> connect it to the APs, but it would obviously be really nice to do
> centralized management.
> 
> It looks to me like one of the simpler ways to do it would be to
> have each AP have an RS-232<->RS-422 adapter on it, then get a
> multiport serial card that can speak RS-422 (or get a -232 card and
> twice as many converters), and put it in a management PC somewhere.
> 
> Of course, each media converter runs on the order of $60, multiport
> serial cards run in the hundreds of dollars, and cable doesn't seem
> to be all that cheap (though I suppose you could probably run the
> signal over Cat5 in a pinch..)
> 
> So, I guess you could do a dozen APs for the price of a decent
> laptop, but considering the low speeds used with serial consoles and
> the infrequent need to use them, are there any good tricks for doing
> this cheaper?



-- 
steve ulrich                       sulrich at botwerks.org
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