Mike Hicks wrote: > 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. This is really where you start to tell the enterprise-level solutions from the soho solutions with aspirations. If you want centralised management, then shop around for APs with the feature set that allows you to do this over ethernet via snmp/telnet/ssh. The extra $$ you'll spend per AP will be paid back by not having to build this extra star network. Many manufacturers have custom applications that do all kinds of interesting goop, sometimes via snmp, sometimes via super-secret (or not-so-super-secret) proprietary back doors. > 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? The question I'd pose would be to zoom out one or two clicks and re-analyze the problem you're trying to solve, and assess what APs are best suited to this problem. Tell us, is this a hypothetical problem, or are you currently stuck with a nest of RS232-admin-only APs that you need to make work ? If so, what brand ? - There are all kinds of widgets out there that have been written for assorted APs (e.g. freebase for Orinoco/Karlnet-like substances.) -- andyw at pobox.com Andy Warner Voice: (612) 801-8549 Fax: (208) 575-5634