I have tried in vain for the past 4 hours to attempt to connect to a device thats connected via serial to one of my servers of which i am 2,000 miles away from both.

I am using linux centos, i have tried everything including minicom, when i setup minicom to both tty i show

ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

so i setup minicom to both using different saved configurations, when i try either, it will simply stay "offline" anything i do in the window doesnt provide a response

anyone else have any ideas how i can connnect to this device via the serial connx?

Not to ask a dumb question, but are you setting the baud rate/parity/stop bit to the correct setting for the device? If you don't it will not work and many devices I've run across have had odd settings. You can set these up in the Minicom configuration page. Also, are you using the proper kind of cable if required (sorry, I don't know a lot about it, but I've run across devices that require a special adapter [usually provided in the kit] which I think does something to the pin output on the DB9).

yup, its a APC reboot switch, so i set it to 2400 / 8 / n / 1
as for the cable, yes, its a standard serial to serial connection cable which works fine on windows boxes which is what im using to using, this is the first time im trying to use linux to connect to the device since i dont have a windows box at the dc