Mac Lion and USB to Serial connection

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Mac Lion and USB to Serial connection

Good Morning,

I am new to the Mac world and I apologize if this is a question that has been answered many times already. Love everything about the MacBook Air running 10.7.3 with the exception of connecting to our Cisco router and switch environmnet. I have purchased two USB to Serial cables and still am not able to get the devices to be recognized. One was a gigawire and the other some generic brand. I believe I loaded both drivers correctly however when I run the "ls /dev/tty*" command I do not see my devices listed.

I was hoping to use the native terminal session instead of minicom or zterm or some other application that I would have to purchase to save money. If someone could point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook Air

Posted on Mar 9, 2012 9:21 AM

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Answer 1

ochocobull Author

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Mar 22, 2012 10:03 AM in response to ochocobull

Ok with a little bit of digging I have solved my own problem mostly.

Here is what I did and I hope it helps others.

I purchased a keyspan model USA 19HS 9 pin USB to serial adaptor. I got mine from Wal-Mart on line because we live in a fairly rural area.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Keyspan-High-Speed-USB-Serial-Adapter-USA-19HS/5934005
Downloaded and installed the Keyspan Serial Assistant software from macupdate http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6292/keyspan-serial-assistant.
Now plug in the new usb to serial adaptor. I don't think it matters what order but this worked for me.
Doing a list of tty devices I found that there are two devices I can choose from. I simply chose the KeySerial1 device for no particular reason. As a side note these two devices should show up when you run the Keyspan network assistant.
Here is a list of my devices when I run the command "ls /dev/tty*"

/dev/tty.KeySerial1

/dev/tty.USA19Hfa13P1.1
It is time to plug in the console cable to the console device. In my case a Cisco switch.
Now open terminal and run the command "screen /dev/tty.KeySerial1"
This should connect you to the switch. I had to press enter a couple of times to get a response.

I was able to do everything I wanted to do. There is one little quirk where you cannot quit or exit a screen session without the process staying open. This means that you cannot open screen again until you have killed this session. I found the easiest way to do this is to run the command "top" and find the PID number of the screen session. You can then run "kill pid#" and that should effectively kill that running session. Maybe someone with a bigger brain can weigh in and help me with this last little bit. I hope this helps someone and please feel free to correct.

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