sun e250: just getting garbage from ttya, get proper login text from rsc

I found an old e250 on the side of the road. someone had placed it out as trash. i want to play with this new toy, perhaps set up a lan file server for media. i intend to install debian on it. that's what i'm most familiar with.

anyway, the machine is headless, no keyboard, and i don't have enough money to purchase a sun type 4/5 keyboard. so i am trying to gain serial access thru ttya. i built a null modem cable. the cable works fine with the built in rsc (i get the rsc post and a login request). but when hooked up to ttya all i get thru hyperterminal, minicom or gtkterm is garbage. lots and lots of weird ascii characters. i'm sure my home grown cable works because rsc displays correctly. all terminals are set 9600,8n1,no flow control. when using the rsc connection i do get full echo of what i type. i'm pretty sure my cable is put together right.

i tried removing the rsc "card" (which is really less of a card and more like expansion ports with a ribbon cable going to the main board) and hooking the null modem cable to ttya, still just garbage on hyperterminal. i read more than one place that once the rsc card is removed the e250 should default to ttya. that didn't help me tho. i even tried working thru the garbage and hitting ctrl-break, ctrl-b in gtkterm. once or twice i was fast enough to get what might have been an ok prompt written in garbage. so i tried typing a few commands i found posted on this forums and others, but i never made any progress on that front.

I built my cable off the following chart:

Connect Pin to Pin on each end.
 
    25-pin           25-pin
     2 --------------- 3
     3 --------------- 2
     4 --------------- 5
     5 --------------- 4
     7 --------------- 7
     6 ---+
          +----------- 20
     8 ---+
               +--- 6
     20 ----------+
               +--- 8

obtained from this website: http://www.softpanorama.org/Solaris/Startup_and_shutdown/serial_console_on_solaris.shtml

i'm using a db25 to db9 converter to connect to my windows laptop or linux desktop.

this machine being foreign to me, i have no interest in trying to get rsc working, i am perfectly happy using ttya. Does anyone have any ideas on where i went wrong?