Ok, so you guys have been talking about terminations and mistakes...
I'm very new to RS-232 but what I've been doing in the few jobs that I did do is to take the loose pins from the connector like Stamp posted  and just plug them into the receiving component. Once I verify that the communication works, I pull the pins out from the equipment one at a time and plug them into the socket. I have never screwed up a connection yet doing things this way.
BTW, I have had issues where manuals state that their pinout is null where it's actually straight. I talked to one MFG that told me that they meant the connection on the other side, not theirs... Whatever. Doing things by loose pins first ensures that even if my RJ45 pinout is screwed up, I'm guaranteed a good connection.
NOT that that's an excuse for leaving wrongly terminated RJ45 end that way.
If you do that, Murphy's law states that the RJ45 cable will need to be replaced 2 days after you forget that the current cable was "custom" pin-out'ed and you'll have a non functioning system :-)