Offer for CQC user

[Satsu]

Hrmmm... Sorry about that Ellisr63.

[ellisr63]

got the proper cables....
stopped CQC (to free up the port)
set up hyper terminal for comm 9 I know comm 9 is a good port as it is for my projector)
powered up digi
hit enter...
nothing at all :-(

[ellisr63]

I made a little progress..... hooked it up to my wireless router and got the MAC Address but I am still unable to get in via serial to assign a IP Address. :-(

[rip74]

Hey Ellis,

if you're still playing with this, I just got my digi portserver up. still trying to get the serial connections working, but was able to get an IP assigned.

the key to my (older) portserver 16 was that it needed to have an IP assigned, and that the firmware only handled RARP not DHCP. rarp is a pre-dhcp IP assigning protocol. it takes the MAC address and assigns an IP based on that.

you said that you have the MAC address. if you can find a RARP daemon/server, it can be used to establish an initial connection to the portserver. I use linux, so there was a rarpd easily installed, I don't know about Windows.

I used the rarp daemon to establish the initial IP, then was able to telnet into the portserver and configure a static IP within the portserver.

[ellisr63]

Hey Ellis,

if you're still playing with this, I just got my digi portserver up. still trying to get the serial connections working, but was able to get an IP assigned.

the key to my (older) portserver 16 was that it needed to have an IP assigned, and that the firmware only handled RARP not DHCP. rarp is a pre-dhcp IP assigning protocol. it takes the MAC address and assigns an IP based on that.

you said that you have the MAC address. if you can find a RARP daemon/server, it can be used to establish an initial connection to the portserver. I use linux, so there was a rarpd easily installed, I don't know about Windows.

I used the rarp daemon to establish the initial IP, then was able to telnet into the portserver and configure a static IP within the portserver.

Thanks for the info... now I don't mean to act stupid but what is a RARP daemon/server? I haven't run Linux in years.:oops:

tia,
Ron

[rip74]

Ron,

going back to your previous comments about com ports first (because this may be more productive). if you're connecting the box to the serial connectors on the back of your box, that should map to one of the basic com ports (com1 or com2). those are the built-in UARTs in your motherboard's chipset. which one it maps to a pure hardware issue, so you'll need to test both (but if there's only a single serial connector on the back of your machine, that will typically be com1).


I only know a little about RARP, but it stands for "reverse address resolution protocol".

each network device has a MAC address, which is considered reasonably unique. that means the MAC address will generally be unique enough within your environment for local servers to identify various network devices, but not unique enough on the broad internet. each server that is responsible for assigning IP addresses dynamically, will use the MAC address to track a given device and match it to an IP address. all additional network traffic is via IP.

nowadays, we use DHCP, which automatically assigns an IP address to a new network device. it records the MAC address and IP address pairs and saves that pair for a reserved amount of time. if you reboot your network device within that time, the DHCP server will match the MAC address of your device to it's internal table and return the same IP address. otherwise, it will allocate a new IP address. this is why your work computer will often end up with the same IP address, but will change every now and then.

RARP is a similar, obsolete protocol. as near as I can tell, it REQUIRES matching the MAC address to it's internal table to assign an IP address. this requires the sysadmin to maintain a table of known MAC addresses. this is a maintenance hassle, and probably why RARP was superseded by DHCP.

my Digi PortServer 16 is an older module, which only uses RARP and not DHCP (newer firmware may add support for DHCP). out of the box, it's configured to use RARP. once I got the IP configured, I shouldn't need RARP any more, as the box is configured to a static IP.

from browsing reports online, it sounds like a lot of the Digi boxes vary in configuration. I'm not clear if your box will try to use RARP (although if it's sending out it's MAC address, I suspect it is). ok, confirmed, the guide for the portserver2 states that you can configure the IP via RARP (see page 1-5).

[ellisr63]

Well I have decided to give this a try again.... Anyone interested in getting mine going in return they will get the other unit for the price of shipping.