StellarTech Blog

Vista is just chalked full of surprises. I’ve been using it since it was first released and still more truths surface about it’s horrific visage silently hiding underneath it’s resource hungry interface. Waiting for an inconvenient moment to make itself known.

One such surprise was to discover that hyper terminal was no longer a part of Windows. While this software doesn’t get used as much as say solitaire, it does come in handy to configure ASAs and other serial devices.

After I made this discovery I cried for a few minutes and then finally got around to learning how to do the same thing with putty due to the necessity of my current predicament. A Cisco ASA 5505 needed some serial love and hyper terminal was no where to be found. Procrastination would just have to wait. ** insert rimshot here **

Using putty turned out to be straight forward and just as easy as hyper terminal which sucked anyway. You can start by opening putty, click Session, select the Serial option, leave speed at 9600, and enter in the COM port.

Next click “Serial” underneath “Connections”. All of the defaults are good with the exception of flow control. Set this option to none.

Finally click open and power on the device. Horray for putty!