Cisco Cable Router Views

General Goods

If you're setting up a Cisco router for the first time, find the long, flat, light blue rollover cable that came with the router. This cable is easy to recognize if you compare both ends of the cable. You'll also see why it's called a rollover cable as the pinouts are opposite to each other; in effect, the cable was rolled over when the second connection was crimped on.

Plug one end of the rollover cable into the connection at the back of the router that is marked console in the same light blue color as the cable. Don't plug the other end of the cable into your FreeBSD computer yet, as you need to use one of the serial adapters that came with the router. You should have a 9-pin and a 25-pin adapter. Take a look at the back of your FreeBSD computer to see which serial port you have available to use. On my system, com1 was taken by my mouse, but com2 was free. Accordingly, I plugged the rollover cable into the 25-pin adapter, then I connected it to com2 on my computer. Once everything was connected, I turned my FreeBSD computer back on and turned on the power switch at the back of the Cisco router.

I'll now press enter and I've entered the setup utility on the Cisco router. Note that I'll be prompted to set IP addresses on the interfaces, the enable password, and the telnet (virtual terminal) password. These are the minimum configurations that will be required to be able to access a Cisco router without the rollover cable. You'll note that in Cisco, most questions have an answer in [] meaning you can just press Enter if you're satisfied with that answer. If you aren't, type in your desired response. The setup process should look like this:

The Cisco 1805 cable router ships with a Cisco cable modem high-speed WAN interface card (HWIC) installed in slot 0 and with a Cisco 10/100BASE-T Ethernet switch HWIC installed in slot 1. Both of these cards must be installed in order for the router to be operational. If either card is removed, the router will default to ROMMON state.