| looking into the ipx |
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| a photo |
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| Mini DIN-8 | |
|---|---|
| 1 | DTR |
| 2 | CTS |
| 3 | TX |
| 4 | GND |
| 5 | RX |
| 6 | RTS |
| 7 | DCD |
| 8 | RTXC (receive clock) |
| note the lack of DSR | |
The material below is cribbed and specialized for the ipx from the unix serial port resources, the serial console on sun or sgi systems FAQ, and the networktechnic pinout page for pc, sun and mac. Another link for pinouts of the world's nicest keyboard, which is not compatible with the ipx, but is still a very nice classic keyboard so it deserves to be listed here.
The IPX has two round mini DIN-8 serial ports, labeled A and B. The are accessed via dev/ttya and /dev/ttyb.
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Console: If there is no keyboard attached then the console is bound to serial port A at 9600 baud, 8N1. Ctrl-A (which interrupts the boot and drops you into the ROM) is accessed via the rs-232 break signal (rx held low for longer than a byte time). The minimum that must be connected for a console connection is Tx, Rx and Gnd (pins 3, 4 and 5). That's what I do. Apparently a old Mac serial cable will do as well, but I haven't tried it.
Port voltage: Many Sun cpu serial ports can be configured as either RS-232 (+/- 12V) or RS-423 (+/- 5V). Defaults vary. See the hardware documentation for your machine to locate the jumper to configure this, if it exists. Most implementations do not have to worry about the voltage on the serial port.
PC Serial ports: For reference, here are typical PC serial port pinouts:
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