SS4000-E Serial Console Problem

Hello all -

I've seen quite a bit of activity about the SS4000-E serial console, and I was wondering if others have had difficulty?

I went out and purchased two 9pin F/F null modem cables. I also purchased two (seemingly different anyway) IDC 10 -> DB9 serial bracket cables.

At first I tried using both of the IDC->DB9 cables as they came, connecting them into the SS4000 and rebooting. I tried on Vista (hyperterm) and Linux (cu) and got absolutely nothing (yes using 115200, 8, n, 1) on the console. I've read that others got at least junk on minicom/cu, but I get nothing.

I saw Tom Judge's website for the pinouts and decided to take apart one of the brackets and re-solder as seen here : http://www.tomjudge.com/index.php/SS4000-E/Serial_Cable ... the debian arm installer page says nothing about needing to re-solder [http://www.id.debian.org/releases/squeeze/armel/ch05s01.html.en] but I figured what the heck.

I tried -just- resoldering wires 3,5,9 ... that still gave nothing. I then unsoldered off every wire from the DB9 connector and -just- resoldered wires 3,5,9 (to 2,3,5 on DB9 respectively). Still absolutely nothing. I even tried making sure the little grounding wire was both on and off Pin 5 (the one that solders directly onto the metal housing)

I'm at a loss here.. nothing I do seems to be working. I've tried ssh'ing into the SS4000 and tried passing information between both serial ports (the intel box runs getty on ttyS0, figured was worth a shot) ... nada, nothing, zilch.

I got the null modem cables from a PC Warehouse... they seem to be a cheap chinese-made version (brand is "SOHO-Family", super cheap looking) ... but could -two- of them not work? Is there something about null modem serial cables I dont know?

Any advice would be appreciated.

-Danny