Alex and I were redoing our shop network today and we had to do some configuring on our Cisco switch. Normally this is no big deal but because I switched to mac recently I realized that I had no clue how to console into a Ciso switch. After a little googling I found a free program called zterm which people said would work. I use a proprietary program called Secure CRT which does console conections but if you do not have that check out zterm.
Anyway obviously there is no serial port on a macbook pro so I needed to use my usb to serial adapter. I plugged it in only to find that my mac did not “see” it as a device. As most Windows users, I was used to it comming up as a comm port so I was not sure where to look for it
As it turns out I needed to get a driver. There was a universal usb to serial driver on Source Forge.
1. Download the driver from here.
2. Install it just like a regular .dmg file by clicking on it and following the directions.
3. If all goes well you should see the new interface in your network preferences.
4. Once you do that you can open Secure CRT or Zterm and select connect with serial and your Usb2Serial device should show up.
You can also use screen to connect if you don’t want to install SecureCRT or Zterm, usually the device show’s up as something under /dev (i.e. mine is /dev/tty.PL2303-0000201A, Just tab it out). by running screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0000201A
Cool, thanks for adding that to the article. Appreciate the feedback!