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Turning Your Mac Into a Serial Console Server
chrisbw writes "Want to put that old VT100 terminal to use? Mac OS X Hits has a story on how to make a couple simple changes in OS X to enable login on a serial terminal (even over a USB serial adapter if you're on a newer mac). Cool trick for adding a text-based web surfing or email terminal in another room, or remote iTunes control!"
Well, my point was that if you're on a newer Mac that doesn't have a serial port, that you can use a USB serial adapter and OS X will happily use it as a regular tty.
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Actually, it will run on almost anything, just it doesn't want to. What many people are doing nowadays is buying old clones and using XPostFacto (try versiontracker.com) to install OS X where it wouldn't normally go. Like on a UMAX clone with a G4 800Mhz upgrade card in it.
- Sherman
There's always TopGunSSH . Its a old-school Palm SSH program, so you can get the command line on Palm. When I connect to my Mac OS X box with it (over TCP/IP mind you, though i think it can still do serial communication. Check out TopGunTelnet for pure-serial emulation.), tcsh by default has problems, most noticeably it seems to not to be able to run Pico or Vi (let alone Emacs).
I havn't messed around with it enough; i've only used it in cases where i need to a little command line hacking from my Treo.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
This might answer your questions (look at section 6):
http://www.netbsd.org/
Short answer:
setenv input-device ttya
setenv output-device ttya