Everyone who is dealing with network-equipment knows about the pain, that almost every notebook / laptop is missing a serial-port today.
My laptop at work and my private MacBook Pro suffers the same problem. So I am using a USB to serial adapter. The one I got (Aten UC-232A) is a plug and play under Windows. But unfortunately it is not that simple (it’s easy at all) on a Mac. But at the end I figured it out I would like to start this blog with a short “how-to”.In short all which has do be done are the following three steps
- Install driver (Mac OS X PL2303 Driver)
- Connect USB to serial adapter to you MacBook
- Starting a screen session
Install driver
You will need a driver for your USB to serial adapter. The one I got is based on the PL2303 chip.
Some vendors provide a Mac driver but even then I found out that the one from the Mac OS X PL2303 driver project works best for me. Why? Well I am on Mac OS X Lion and after testing the driver from Aten I can say that I did not figure out how this should work. So I decided to go with the one I linked in the list above.
Please be aware that after you installed the driver your Mac will ask for a reboot – so it may be a good idea to save all the work before you start installing the driver.
Also please do not plug in you USB to serial adapter before you installed the driver. Yes I know nothing bad will happen so it didn’t to me at all, but you know Mr. Murphy and his law?
So just download the driver from the project website and install it. After the installation process has finished just reboot your Mac and …
Connect your USB to serial adaptor to your MAC
Yes that’s all for this step. No fancy stuff but I saw a lot of strange problems you would never think about.
Starting a screen session
You can of course use a special terminal software like zterm to connect to your serial device. But in this short “how-to” I would like to use the “Terminal”-App and the small but great program called “screen”.
So just fire up the “Terminal”-App – Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal. In this window just type
screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600
and hit ENTER. You should now be connected to your (network-)device via a serial connection.