I’ve gotten a look at a powerpoint with the technical details now. Nothing too earth shattering. More of a natural progression of capabilities and performance.
I’m such a geek. The one cool new feature is that they have finally put in a USB console port. Actually mini USB. I’m not sure of the wisdom of using that over the already present regular USB ports, but that’s ok. I can’t find anything about how that’s going to work. I expect you’ll have to install a driver for USB to COM on windows just like you do with the USB to Serial dongles but this should be Cisco provided.
How cool would it be if there’s a hidden driver for that in Windows 7 already.
Now all we need is a wireless USB KVM and you could manage a whole data center of routers without running more cables. Better have some good security on that!
Get a closer look at some of the details released in the presentation slides at the following post on my blog.
http://commoditycomputingblog.com/2009/10/14/more-leaked-information-on-ciscos-g2-isrs/
Regarding “I’m not sure of the wisdom of using that over the already present regular USB ports”, unless I’m misunderstanding, the difference is that the CURRENT USB ports are HOST ports, which accept USB devices (memory, specifically), whereas a console port would be a slave port, which would appear as a device to a host PC..
USB, unlike old fashioned serial or even firewire, have distinct “master / slave” roles.
Does that make sense, or am I missing something?
Steve, I know about that and perhaps they’re trying to have some cost savings. I’ve also seen devices that can do both master or slave role. There aren’t many though so I have to wonder if the chip or the programming is expensive. Either way, you’d think it would be something Cisco could have figured out. They’ve got people way smarter than me working on these things though!