We were bombarded with dozens of menus for parameters affecting administration, all serial ports, groups of serial ports or individual ports. All the menus were laid out logically, with deeper menus visible through a stacked-tab viewing layout.
Among the device's more interesting options is the Special Administration Console facility for Windows 2003. The CM16 provides a GUI front end to emergency features, such as Shutdown, Show and Kill Processes, and Show and Configure Network Interfaces. We found the setup process tedious but straightforward, proving no more difficult than editing the Cyclades ACS16's configuration files.
We could set the CM16 to deliver logs to a syslog server and notify us through e-mail or SNMP. The system provided several key status pages that let us see the status of significant parameters--such as ports in use, errors or warnings over time and user status--from the browser interface.
There weren't as many options for configuring the information stored in the logs as we found in the Cyclades system, but some nifty built-in tools may make up the difference for many users. For example, the CM16 will identify log entries by port alias rather than number, making problem identification a bit easier. When problems are suspected on an individual serial interface, a "sniff" mode will let you see all the traffic passing on the port, so you can break in if necessary. Between the snapshot status pages and the sniff interface, the Digi unit provides solid management and administration functions in an easy-to-use package.
In our power-interruption testing, the CM16 left no hanging sessions on test equipment. The only security issue we found was that Web-based management sessions were kept alive for a very long time; there's no way to alter the time-out parameters from the Web-based management system. Unlike the Cyclades system, which required reauthentication if there was no activity for several minutes, we could leave the Digi alone for extended periods and return to a live session.
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