Console Cable for Connecting to Cisco Devices

When you first received your Cisco devices out of the box, you're going to need console cable to start configuring your devices for the first time.

Console cable is a cable which has an RJ45 connector at one end (to connect to your Cisco devices) and serial connector at the other end (to connect to your PC).

Console cable made with the rollover cable wiring scheme, you can see at the image above how you can make your own rollover cable.
It's really simple actually, you just swap the first cable at one end to the last cable at the other end, second cable to the seventh cable, and so on.

As I said, one end should have RJ45 cable that you should plug at your Cisco Device console port and the other end has serial connector that you connect to your PC's serial port.

The images on the left side are the images of the console cable and serial connectors (DB25 on the left and DB9 on the right) provided by Cisco.

Below is the image of console port that you can find at Cisco devices:


Cisco also has a console cable that already has an RJ45 connector at one end and pre-installed Serial Connector at the other end like this:


There's a reason why you should use console cable to configure your Cisco devices for the first time.

The devices come with a minimum configuration from the factory, they don't have any IP addresses so you can't telnet or SSH to them - telnet or SSH are the most common ways to configure your devices.
The best option is to use serial connection to directly configure the devices, this gives you a freedom to config them as you wish.