Thursday, December 23, 2004

Hyperterminal Woes

I spent a bit of time at work the past couple of days installing an upgraded flash into the Pix's. I used my PDA the first time and found that it was a little slow, but did the job. Didn't seem to work that great when connecting and disconnecting between different connections. I even thought I had a PIX that had a problem after I upgraded the flash. However after reseating the card and resetting my hyperterminal session I managed to finally get the thing to boot up. Now of course I don't know whether it was just the terminal session or the actual card. The weird thing about hyperterminal is that sometimes if you close hyperterminal down without doing a disconnect it can sometimes leave the port tied up. Although there is probably an SVCHOST or some other I/O process that can be reset, the easiest thing to do is just unplug the USB to serial cable and plug it back in.

I'm going to have the students hook everything up this year so that all they really understand the layout of the equipment. Last year it took them half the term before they understood the topology, and even then some of them still didn't really figure it out. It makes troubleshooting especially hard when troubleshooting during the labs. It seemed they had a hard time with a simple pinging process or checking routing table topologies.

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