Getting Started - Making the connection

Hello everybody,

As you all know already, my idea here is to document and share my experience  with my cisco 2610. Eventually I might look for a CCENT / CCNA but now I just want to get familiar and be able to configure and troubleshoot my "toy".

Last time I wast telling how to build the console cable, now its time to hookup to the computer and fire up.

When you get your router, you will probably first connect to it via console serial connection. This connection is made possible by an RJ-45-to-RJ-45 rollover cable (it's a light blue CAT5-ish cable), an RJ-45 to serial connector, and a PC equipped with HyperTerminal. To connect the rollover cable to the router, follow these steps:

1. Locate the jack with the circled blue "console" label.
2. Attatch the RJ45 on the console connector.
3. Plug the serial adapter into the designated PC.

Once all of the cables are connected, you need to set up HyperTerminal, which can be found (in Windows 2000) by selecting Programs | Accessories | Communication. When you first start HyperTerminal, you will have to configure it in order to connect to the router. To configure HyperTerminal, select File | Properties and you will see the Properties page shown in Figure A.

Figure A

In HyperTerminal, the Properties page allows you to choose the connection to configure.

In our example, we are going to configure COM1, so we'll select COM1 from the Connect Using drop-down menu and then click Configure. The COM1 Properties page is shown in Figure B.

Figure B

The COM1 Properties page allows you to configure the Bits Per Second, Data Bits, Parity, Stop Bits, and Flow Control.

In order to connect to your Cisco router, you will need to verify that the options are configured as they were in Figure A. Once you've verified the changes, click Connect, which is the left button shown in Figure C, and then press [Enter].

Figure C
The HyperTerminal button bar contains the Connect and Disconnect buttons.

Now when I turn my router on, with HyperTerminal setup and open, this is what I got:

=============================================
System Bootstrap, Version 11.3(2)XA4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 1999 by cisco Systems, Inc.
TAC:Home:SW:IOS:Specials for info
C2600 platform with 49152 Kbytes of main memory

program load complete, entry point: 0x80008000, size: 0xa14d18
Self decompressing the image : #################################################
################################################################################
###############################################################################
================================================

There are more but I just would like to show what to expect if you did everything right.

Thats it for now.
Cheers