Specifications

104
SERVSWITCH™ AFFINITY
8. Using the CPU Ports as
Serial Ports
When you connect its CPU ports to their serial ports as described in Section 3.3.6
and configure the CPU ports as described in Section 4.3, an -R2 ServSwitch™
Affinity (KV132A-R2, KV134A-R2, or KV138A) can be used to manage devices such
as routers, hubs, and network switches. The Affinity performs industry-standard
VT100 terminal emulation. You can also use it in standard TTY mode and it will
automatically scroll incoming data.
NOTE
If you have original (non-R2) Affinity units, -R3 or earlier Matrix
ServSwitches, or PC-only Matrix ServSwitches attached to your Affinity
system, you won’t be able to attach serial devices to those chassis, but
you will be able to use their user stations to access serial devices
attached to -R2 Affinity units or -R4 multiplatform Matrix ServSwitches.
If you’d like to upgrade an original (non-R2) Affinity with the new -R2
serial features, install the KV130-UPG upgrade kit as described in
Appendix F.
Figure 8-1 shows a typical screen from a UNIX computer. The serial data from
the computer is shown in the standard 24 x 80 area. Below the data are two status
lines. The first line shows the current user-station name (“NOC station 12”), user
name (“Martin”), connect mode (“Share mode”), and computer name (“Unix
NCC”) that are currently in use. These fields all reflect the Affinity’s current state.
The Affinity also implements an eight-page scroll buffer. View up to eight pages
of previous data using the page-up [PgUp] and page-down [PgDn] keys as shown
in the second status line. Use the [F12] key to clear the screen. The number of the
page to which you’ve scrolled is shown at the right of the second status line. The
two colors on the screen correspond to the background and text colors that you
can set in the Affinity’s “Configure System” page (see Section 4.2.3).
At times you might see a rapidly changing screen when you switch to a serial
port. This is because the first time you connect to a serial port with no data in the
buffer, you will get a blank screen with the cursor in the upper left-hand corner. As
you interact with the computer, the screen fills up with data. This data is stored in
the Affinity in a separate buffer for each computer port. When you disconnect and
later reconnect to this serial port, the data that is in the buffer is sent to the user
station. So you might see a replay of old buffer data as it is loaded from the buffer
to the user station.