USB Serial Dongle Drivers
Posted by Tres Tue, 04 Jul 2006 13:45:12 GMT
If you’ve got a MacBook or PowerBook, and need to work on Cisco switches, you know that you’ve got to use a USB Serial dongle in order to do the job. But the problem is, first–finding a driver that will work for OS X, and second, sending the all-important BREAK to the Cisco device. I’ve had one of the IOGear -232A serial dongles for years now, it works just fine for everything EXCEPT sending a break.
I guess there’s a kludge involving changing baud rates and sending garbage, but I’m not really interested in kludges; this is why I use OS X, not Linux on my desktop – I just want things to work (this is not intended as a flame, just reality at present).
Anyway, I just found out that there’s a Sourceforge project providing open source drivers for the plethora of different brands that these devices are sold under.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/
I’ve still got to verify whether BREAK will work using the new drivers, but even if it doesn’t, and you’re looking for drivers for one of these devices, check out the sourceforge project.