Serial Ports

in this video from IT free training I will look at serial ports serial ports have been around since the first personal computers but are largely obsolete nowadays if you are fixing or working with some old equipment you may still come across them a serial interface is an interface that transfers data one bit at a time in the early days of computing pretty much every computer came with one or two serial ports generally one small and one large one there are many devices in a computer that use serial communication a good example of this is the universal serial bus or USB there is however only one type of connection that is referred to as a serial port serial ports like the one shown use what is referred to as the rs-232 standard this standard defines how data is sent over the port for this reason you may hear a serial connection referred to as an rs-232 connection they are also commonly referred to as communication ports or comm ports for short the serial ports themselves are called de 9 and db25 the D refers to the shape of the connector the letters E and B refer to the size of the connector the number at the end refers to the number of pins in the connector 2 folding meet the rs-232 standard the serial port required 25 pins both connectors shown use serial communication since serial communication is used this essentially means that only two pins are required for data transfer 1 to transmit data and one to receive data thus both connectors have the same number of pins used for data what is different however is the larger connector has more pins that are used for signaling even back when serial ports were being used there were very few devices on the market that required the extra pins for signaling for this reason generally as time passed only the smaller serial ports were used to implement the larger serial port cost more money and if the functionality was not being used it was a waste of time as time passed some computers would have two smaller serial ports later still the serial ports on computers started to decline so only one of the smaller serial ports was included nowadays you won't find a serial port on a computer some motherboards will have a header where a serial port can be added otherwise they won't have anything as time goes on it is expected that the serial port will disappear from the computer altogether nowadays generally the only time you will see a serial port is when working with old equipment or accessing certain hardware devices let's have a look at how you may go about doing this if your motherboard has a serial port header you can purchase a bracket with a cable that will plug into the header on the motherboard it is just a matter of installing the bracket in a free expansion slot on the motherboard you can also purchase 8 USB to serial port cable this is the easy option nowadays given that the administrator will rarely need access to a serial port the USB cable is something the administrator can keep around for when they need it often a technician will use a serial port to access equipment this will often be done just out of convenience using a laptop a bracket cannot be installed in a laptop so the USB the serial cable is a good option in some cases you may need to change the serial port from one type to another to do this you can use an adapter the adapter will convert de9 to db25 you can also get adapters that change the gender of the connection sometimes this may be useful nowadays generally the USB the serial cable will work in most cases now let's have a look at how you would access a device using the serial port there are many different software programs that can be used to access the serial port in this demonstration I will use some free software called putty putty can always be used for secure shell telnet and serial connections it has a lot of features and is free so it is good software for the administrator to have serial connections are not automatically configured like a lot of modern computer components in most cases a serial connection is a last resort if you have another way of accessing the device I would use that in this case I will use the following configuration every device potentially has a different configuration but you will find that a lot of devices support this particular configuration if you are having trouble consult the device manual to find out what the settings should be in this demonstration I will connect a silkworm fiber switch this device has a serial plug at the front of the device into this I will plug my serial to USB cable which I will then plug directly into my computer I have already downloaded putty when I run putty the configuration screen will appear to configure the serial connection I will select the serial option at the bottom I next need to change the serial port to the correct port number if you don't know which port it is have a look in device manager to find out in this case the port number is three the only other setting that I need to change is flow control which I will set to none once all the options are configured I will select session at the top and then select the connection type as serial now when I press open putty will open a serial connection to the device I will now switch on the device and you will notice the device starting up once the device has started up I will be able to login to the device if you're not able to access the device using the network connection you can always use the serial connection if it is available nowadays you will most likely use other methods to access the device if you have an old device or no other method is available you may need to use the serial connection to access the device that concludes this video on serial ports I hope you found this video useful until the next video I would like to thank you for watching

Channel: itfreetraining

Views: 22,064

Keywords: Serial Ports, 220-1001, A+, CompTIA, ITFreeTraining

Id: O1MhwPb2NWA

Length: 6min 23sec (383 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020