Cygwin & local ports

I bet this is a simple question for anyone who knows what they're doing.

I'm trying to set up conserver for communicating with some stand-alone
devices, each of which has two serial ports.  (If this works, I'll
probably be able to convince my company to get a 16-port PCI serial card
and then we won't need one PC for each device we need to control.)  So
currently I'm on cygwin, but the *real* setup with more ports will be on
Linux.  Proof of concept, y'know.

I built conserver with: --with-extmsgs --with-port=7072
--with-master=localhost

In one cygwin shell (trimming timestamps):

$ /usr/local/sbin/conserver.exe -v
conserver.com version 8.1.13
started as 'Administrator' by 'Administrator'
INFO: interface address 0.0.0.0 (eth0)
INFO: interface address 127.0.0.1 (lo)
INFO: interface address 172.x.x.x (eth1)
INFO: access type 't' for '127.0.0.1'
INFO: peer server on '127.0.0.1'
INFO: <master> login Administrator@localhost
INFO: <master> logout Administrator@localhost
(repeats some 10-20 times)

On the other cygwin shell:
$ console -v a
console: interface address 0.0.0.0 (eth0)
console: interface address 127.0.0.1 (lo)
console: interface address 172.x.x.x (eth1)
console: forwarding level too deep!

The config file is appended here:

default * {
	logfile /cygdrive/c/logs/&;
	timestamp 1mab;
   	rw *;
 	type device;
    master 127.0.0.1;
   	portbase 2000;
  	portinc 1;

    device /dev/ttyS&;
    baud 57600;
    parity none;
}

console a { port 1; }	# calculates to tcp port 2001
console b { port 2; }	# calculates to tcp port 2002

access * {
	trusted 127.0.0.1;
}

-----

I'm sure there's something obvious here that I'm missing, but I'm not
sure what.  I think it's trying to forward the connection somewhere,
rather than using the local serial ports.  That might be useful at some
point in the future, but for now, all I want to do is talk to a serial port.

Suggestions?

-- 
     Chris Riddoch
epistemological humility