We use Cyclades (avocent) devices in our data center. They have worked great for us. Very reliable. Modem dial-in gives us great remote capabilities if we have a major outage. We had troubles initially getting them to work because the cable adapters were never pinned correctly for Cisco. We ended up making our own rolled rj45-rj45 cables. IIRC, this was a ton of work as you need to do some funky 2 wires in one position stuff. We also use Cisco 2500's with modem on the aux and an octo-cable for the devices. This works well too, but not as nice of an interface as the Cyclades. No special cables needed though. For power we have been using APC Managed PDU's. These have been fantastic. No compaints. -----Original Message----- From: Mehmet Akcin [mailto:mehmet@akcin.net] Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 9:30 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Managing your network devices via console Hello, It's always cool to have console access to routers/switches and nowadays they are going from RS-232 to RJ-45 as a standart. I have got Avocent DSR 2035 which is a KVM+Serial console (all in one).. but while I was able to have it work against servers via KVM or/and Serial , I was unable to make it work properly against any network device. I am wondering if anyone had experience on DSR or similar boxes to configure them against network devices console ports. Making suggestions for alternative ways of centralizing network device console management is also more than welcome, I guess the old fashioned server attached usb-serial console is one of the most preferred way, but feel free to provide if you have good ideas cheers -- Mehmet