Tag Archives: Cisco

ESX 4.0 and USB devices

I’m having trouble getting USB to work on one of my ESX 4.0 hosts.  I did a bunch of research and found that in the initial release of ESX 4 USB was ‘supposed’ to work but didn’t.  All the posts I read indicated that this was fixed in subsequent releases so I went about the task of upgrading my host to the newest release.

After quite a bit of fiddling I was able to get Update 3 installed.  After this I still have not had any luck getting my USB device to connect.  I’m tryinmg to connect a Serial to USB adapter so that I can connect to a Cisco console cable, or other serial devices.  I do have it working just over the regular com/serial port onboard, but I want it to work via USB so that I can more easily move the connection around to other boxes/laptops/etc.

Much of the info that I read dealt with USB HDs so perhaps they work but not these other types of devices/adapters?  If anyone has any ideas I sure would appreciate it!

GNS3, my new best friend

I’ve just been in a Cisco training for the last few days.  The facility is very clean, nice, and the training was very well laid out and valuable.

As I suspect is often the case with these types of environments there were a few technical issues with our lab equipment.  These classrooms are not dedicated to any one class so keeping the gear in the class is impractical.  There are a lot of moving parts and keeping everything straight and running is surely no small task.  The actual hardware is somewhere else and connected to the classroom via the network.  In our class there were issues with the connection to our gear and it was slowing down our progress.

The instructor very thoughtfully had already prepared an environment that would better facilitate the labs.  In comes GNS3.  I had not used, or even heard of, this little gem and I am sorry for it.  GNS3 is an open source “Graphical Network Simulator” that allows you to model network devices virtually.  Continue reading GNS3, my new best friend