Serial and USB Console on Mac OSX

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:

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