DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

So, you’re a network administrator like myself, and you love and use macs, but, that can be a bit of a pain when you want to go and console onto a router, given macs don’t have a serial port.

In order to get around this problem, you’re going to need a USB to Serial Converter Cable, and the one that I use can be purchased here for less than £20. Once you get your hands on it, you can then take yourself to the manufacturers website where you can pick up the latest Universal drivers for OSX (if you have an Intel based mac) and get installing.

Once the drivers are installed and you’ve done a reboot, opening up terminal you will see the following device is now listed:

/dev/tty.usbserial

In order to access this, you can just use screen as follows:

screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600

and you will now have a console connection via your serial cable to your router / switch etc. In order to break the connection, you simply need to issue a control-a and then control-\.

Ah yes, it doesn’t get much better than this. Sitting in my favourite part of my favourite city in the world having breakfast, it’s a tough life!!