At work, we inherited an old (and I mean old) HP ProCurve 4000m 48+ port switch (although only a quarter of those will be used). This thing is a MONSTER. I'm pretty inexperienced in professional tier networking, and am attempting to get it configured.
It has been reset to factory defaults, which means that it does not grab an IP or network mask for me to log into its management interface. According to the manual, I need to log into it via terminal to give it an IP. The manual is vague on exactly HOW to do this, though. The terminal port on the switch appears to be a standard serial port, but a serial-to-RJ45 adapter came with the switch (The label on the adapter reads something like "UTP Grounding Tap" if that's important to anyone).
Now, assuming I plug a patch cable into that adapter and into my laptop, how do I proceed to get terminal access to the switch using my terminal emulation program (which happens to be xfce-terminal but I can use pretty much any linux terminal on it if it matters)?