Obviously nowadays when admining we mostly have laptops - laptops don’t tend to come with serial I/O ports anymore, so you buy a Serial -> USB adapter, say this one ↗ or any one with a legit (there are fakes) FDTI FT232RL chipset.
Download and install the relevant drivers but where do we go from here?
Specifically on mac, find your device’s tty name:
cd /dev
ls -ltr *usb*
I added a handy little alias to my
.bash_profile so i don’t have to remember the screen’s tty connection name (obviously replace the tty.usbserial-XXXXXXXX with your converter’s tty):
alias serial='screen /dev/tty.usbserial-XXXXXXXX'
So you can use this to connect instead:
serial [baudrate]
You can of course use the same method to connect to Cisco switches and routers that have USB consoles:
Why not follow @mylesagray on Twitter ↗ for more like this!