Cisco 2610 Router: First Experiences
Today I received the final pieces in the puzzle for my Cisco router. The ADSL WAN interface card I bought off eBay arrived, and so did a console cable from my friend Michael (needed for the initial configuration). So I took it all under the house and plugged it into my rack. And then the fun began…
Last night I had prepared for the fun by turning on my server’s serial ports in the BIOS, which I had turned off previously because I never thought I’d have a use for them again. Tonight I had to figure out how to use MAKEDEV to set them up. Hardly difficult, but the documentation (as usual) was completely useless. Luckily Google turned up the right command to use. I used a program called minicom to interact with the router over the serial port.
When I turned on the router, it went through its startup routine, and presented me a dialog asking me if I wanted to go through initial configuration. I selected yes, and so I was asked a series of questions, the answers to which I only just understood (I mostly accepted the defaults, which proved to be a pain later). I was silly enough to use 192.168.1.1 as the router’s IP address, which conflicts with my current router (in theory I’d never need to have them both turned on at the same time).
It was at this stage that I tried to configure a DHCP server, only to find that the firmware on my router was too old to support it (it was released in July 2000). I have a newer firmware image (and one that also supports ADSL interface cards and PPPoE), but that requires twice as much flash memory as my router currently has. So off I went to eBay again. With any luck it should arrive within a couple of weeks. I have a feeling this is going to be a fairly long process.