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Legacy Network Connectors

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21 views3 pages

Legacy Network Connectors

Uploaded by

Arixson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Legacy Network Connections

I love CompTIA, but one of the problems I have with CompTIA as an organization, is
that there's always a few members who want people to learn about old technologies.
Technologies that in my opinion really aren't used anymore within the world of
networking.

However, since it's on the exam, I want to talk about two types of what the CompTIA
exams call network connections. And those are called serial ports and parallel
ports.

So let's go ahead and start first of all with serial ports.

Serial ports are literally the oldest I/O connection in the world of computers.

The original IBM PC circa 1980 had serial ports which are very low speed, two-way
ports to allow us to make connections to different types of things.

There were, well, back in your grandfather's day, networks that actually use these
types of connections for networking, but that technology is so far gone that I am
going to mention it for the exam and then I'm going to be happy.

In particular, serial ports use a language called RS-232, and RS-232 uses things
like, you know,
when you connect to devices they'll say, request to send, I'm ready to receive
data, sending data, these types of things, and the physical connection is going to
manifest as either what's known as a D-B 9 or a D-B 25.

So I've got some examples of serial ports here.

Let me show them to you.

OK.

So right here is an old-time serial port.

This motherboard is around 14 years old.

So I had to dig deep to find one of these.

If you take a look at this, you'll see that it's kind of shaped like a D, which is
where the D comes from.

And then if you can count the pins, I think we can count them.

you'll see that there are nine pins there.

So this connection right here is what we call a DB-9. We would plug something like
this into that connection.

So this is a, what we call a female D-B 9 connector.

And then on the motherboard itself is what we call a male D-B 9 port.

There is also something called a D-B 25.

I got to tell you, even I, with my vast collection of old stuf,f had a little
trouble finding one, but this is actually one right here.
So this is a little adapter.

If we take a look at this adapter, you'll see that on one side it's D-B 9, and then
on the other side, it's D-B 25.

And this would be used, there were some really old computers that you had to switch
from D-B 25, and this is 25 pins, to D-B 9, and that's about the only thing I had
left laying around. The other one that we did see used very rarely, but it was
used.

It's called a parallel port.

This is also known as an IEEE 1284. I'll talk about IEEE in just a minute, but if
you take a look on the same motherboard, you're going to see, in this case it's
still a D-B connector,
but this time it's female.

This is a parallel port. Parallel ports were used more than anything else, back in
the old days, for printers.

However, there were a few networking technologies with names, let's see if any old
people are watching this, LANtastic.

Does that ring any bells? Where they would actually use these parallel ports as a
very primitive bus- type networking connection.

They're old, they're ancient, and they're just not used anymore.

However, if you ever run into this on the exam, you'll at least recognize it.
Pretty much guarantee they'll use them as wrong answers more than anything else.

Now when I mentioned IEEE 1284, what I want to bring up is the fact that IEEE,
which is the
American standards organization, is the body that organized network standards, and
that's why stuff like this is probably on the exam because there actually were
standards, IEEE standards for it.

But what I want to talk about real quick is that something really important
happened in February of 1980. In February of 1980, the IEEE said, look, we've got
all these different companies trying to make all these different network standards,
different types of cabling, different types of network cards, different types of
everything.

We're going to start making standards. And what they did, is they created what were
known as the 802 committee.

So let me put it on the screen here, some examples of 802 committees.

Now this is just a tiny fraction of what you could see for the 802 committee.

So 802, February of 1980, and anything that the IEEE generates that's from the 802
standards,
has something to do with networking.

And again this is just a small example.

What I would like you to do, is if you take a look at the screen, you notice
something called 802.3. That's something that we call Ethernet, which will become
really, really important in other episodes.
Okay as soon as I tell you that things like this are no longer used, I'm going to
give you one really, really important exception.

On a lot of higher end routers, if you take a look right here, you see that blue
connector called the console port? For a lot of higher end routers, what we do, is
we use a very special cable called a rollover or a Yost cable. On one end it looks
like an RJ 45, but it's really not.

Its really a serial connection.

So I want to plug this in, and then this is an old school D-B 9 serial port, and I
still keep around a laptop that has an old time serial connection on it, see if I
can get that guy in there, There we go, it's barely hanging on.

He's on.

And what I can do with this, is this gives me an ability, that no matter what else
is happening, if, if I'm having troubles with a router or switch, whatever it might
be, this gives me a very low end way to connect to that device.

We use this for initial configuration, if something has to be completely reset from
the factory,
this is something that really pretty much all network guys use. In fact to this
day, if I want to know if a guy's a real network guy, I'm going to ask him to pull
out his laptop case, and if he's got a Yost cable in there, he's probably the real
McCoy.

DB-9 and DB-25 are legacy serial network connections

PArallel ports were typically used with printers

A Yost (or rollover) cable is a serial cable used to configure a router or switch

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