I received this Bluetooth console adapter from Intertooth for testing purposes. A huge thank you to Bojan for sending it over—your support is greatly appreciated. The adapter is incredibly easy to set up and use, eliminating the usual hassle of dealing with USB-to-serial cables and searching for the right drivers.
Intertooth supports both RS232 and USB consoles. As shown in the images below, you can use either a Cat6 Ethernet cable or the provided USB-mini cable (depending on the device’s console port) to access the device’s console. This device has a battery life of around 15 hours of operation and in certain cases, you can let the device charge when using USB-mini cable option. Here are the unique features of the product.
You can refer to the following documents to get the full details about the product.
You can simply add ‘intertooth’ as a Bluetooth device to your computer (Mac or Windows). Below is a screenshot of the prompt that appears when adding the intertooth device to my Windows laptop. By default, it will not ask for a PIN, since I have set a PIN (you will see how to configure it a bit later)
Once paired with your intertooth, it is normal to appear as “Not connected“
Then you can go to your favorite terminal access application, you should be able to select your intertooth as a console port.
It should directly prompt you for your device console credentials (if configured). You can access the ‘intertooth’ device configuration menu by simply typing $$$$$.
You can do a few simple configurations like hostname, LED color, brightness and a PIN for security when pairing it to a computer.
You can set up a bluetooth PIN for your device and that is required when you pair it for your computer.
Configurations will be automatically saved when you type the exit command.
Additionally, you can configure the baud rate of the console connection. This is quite useful because the latest Cisco APs (starting with version 17.12.x) have changed it to 115200 bps to improve the AP booting time. Here is example of accessing a Cisco switch with standard 9600 bps baud rate.
Here is when I need to access an AP console running on 17.12.x or later.
There are few view commands available to verify configs, battery life and version details.
Here is the BLE console in action. I ran the “show tech support” command a few times while connecting to a cisco device via intertooh.
Since I am back to consulting work (balancing it with my teaching), this is a very useful tool to carry around these days to get device console access. If you haven’t heard of ‘intertooth’ probably it is a good time to check it out.