In reply to your message of Fri, 02 Jul 2004 13:30:11 EDT:

Well, just to put an oar in since I've some small experience
with RS-232, ;-)

First and foremost, test your cable against a port you know is
hot and will talk. Right now, it's a guess as to whether the
problem is with the cable or the Mac. One good approach would
be to boot the Mac into OS 9, bring up a terminal emulator
of your choice, then try and get characters typed there to
appear on the laptop, and vice versa. That will verify the
cable transport path. If that's not possible or doesn't work...

If you built the cable (and it sounded like you did), then
try swapping TxD and RxD (I forget what pins those are on 
the Mac mini-DIN8 and the PC DB-9), which on a DB-25 are pins 2 and 3.

Now, AFAIK the Mac isn't supposed to require hardware flow of any kind for
the serial console, but you may want to check this anyway because
I have seen Mac serial f/w (Quadra 800, AIRC) that won't initialize without 
DTR/DSR being present. You may also want to try presenting the hardware
flow signals CTS and RTS on their appropriate pins.

Unfortunately, a breakout box is the tool of choice here, and I'm
assuming you don't have one of those.

Others may have more substantive suggestions regarding 8600-specific
things.
.02,
	Paul

                          Paul "Corwin" Frommeyer
             Work         Internet Engineer, CCIE               Play
     Senior Network Engineer                          Network Sorcerer At Large
   Deskey Integrated Branding                            Paul's Fone Company
     pfrommeyer@deskey.com                                corwin@palas.com
          *** Speaking solely for myself unless otherwise noted ***