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Sabrent SBT-USC6M USB to Serial Adapter on Mac OS X

For some reason I had a hell of time trying to use this $9.99 USB to Serial adapter on my MacBook Pro to console into my Sun Netra servers. For anyone out there Googling this (I hope the title should suffice once spidered) this is how you should go about getting this adapter to work.

First off don’t use the driver from the Sabrent site. It does not work! I’ve installed the supplied driver twice and found that nothing was listed in /dev/ to prove it was actually installed. This adapter uses the PL2303 chip and thankfully there is a OS X driver project team out there that wrote one that actually works. So first head on over to http://osx-pl2303.sourceforge.net/ and pick up the latest driver. Once installed you can test to see if it was successful by checking your /dev/ directory. You want to be looking for a “cu.XXXXXX” device. In my case…

[ wjones@teabrick ~ ] ls -l /dev/
total 2.0K
c------r-- 1 root   wheel    17,   3 2008-10-09 22:59 appleAE0
crw------- 1 root   wheel    10,   0 2008-10-09 22:59 autofs
crw------- 1 root   wheel    13,   0 2008-10-09 22:59 autofs_control
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel    11,   1 2008-10-09 22:59 autofs_nowait
crw------- 1 root   wheel    23,   0 2008-10-09 23:00 bpf0
crw------- 1 root   wheel    23,   1 2008-10-09 22:59 bpf1
crw------- 1 root   wheel    23,   2 2008-10-09 22:59 bpf2
crw------- 1 root   wheel    23,   3 2008-10-09 22:59 bpf3
crw------- 1 wjones staff     0,   0 2008-10-09 23:00 console
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel     9,   5 2008-10-09 22:59 cu.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel     9,   3 2008-10-09 22:59 cu.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel     9,   1 2008-10-09 23:15 cu.PL2303-0000201A
brw-r----- 1 root   operator 14,   0 2008-10-09 22:59 disk0
brw-r----- 1 root   operator 14,   1 2008-10-09 22:59 disk0s1
brw-r----- 1 root   operator 14,   2 2008-10-09 22:59 disk0s2
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel    24,   2 2008-10-09 22:59 dtrace
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   wheel    25,   0 2008-10-09 22:59 dtracehelper

Now you know your serial adapter has successfully been installed. You can now console into your servers with your program of choice using /dev/cu.PL2303-0000201A and everything should work out. I recommend minicom which can be found in the macports selection. Hope this will help some people out there.