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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!"
for educational establishments instead of usimng big sparcs it could come in handy
Actually, OS X runs on my old 233 MHz G3 tower, which came out around a year before the iMac, which was Apple's first USB equipped Mac. However, this computer does have a USB card in it.
Vonal Declosion
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/
Yeah, at one time I got really excited about rigging up some cables to hook a VT220 up to my Linux box.
Problem is, there just isn't much point. Computers are *cheap* these days, and finding a used computer from the masses out there made in the last twenty years is easy. You can use any x86 box ever *made* as a good terminal emulator, and get color and other goodies the VT doesn't provide.
There are lots of terminal emulation programs, though if you have 4 MB of memory on the thing or more, I'd probably run Linux, which was originally a terminal emulator and still makes a darn good one. And if you just love the amber look of the VTs, you can theme your Linux terminal box using this relatively unknown program.
You also then get color, a nice big scrollback buffer, multiple virtual terminals per box. You don't have to hassle with weird cables -- a null modem cable is all it takes. You can put cast-off monitors of any size on the thing (and the move to LCDs is producing lots of excess CRTs...getting used 15 inchers for free is easy, and they're much nicer and larger than the VT100 screens, and don't have the annoying whine to them).
May we never see th
I just bought a second-hand iMac to replace the terminal next to my bed. I can now browse with Mozilla instead of Lynx, in bed, and have many good dreams afterwards :-)
-- Cheers!
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
Here's a thought. I could get an old iBook hooked up to a really nice stereo system through a USB converter, and set up this terminal thing, but is there a way to control it through a PDA that supports Wi-Fi, like the Tungsten W? Any terminal emulation software on those?
Because it would be nifty as hell to be able to control all 10GB's of my music through a nice little portable PDA acting as a sort of "remote". Anyone know of terminal emulation software for a Palm?
- Sherman
What's the point? This would've been interesting 10 years ago, but nowadays it's pointless.
You can get to your Mac console on ethernet via the firmware shell (I don't remember exactly how but it's there), so you don't need a serial console for that.
And as for surfing and listening to MP3s, I have Opera on my Zaurus with a wireless connection, talking to the SLiMP3 web server. From there I can control the music on ANY computer or SLiMP3 in the house (PS: the slimp3 software rocks and doesn't require the slimp3 device!). I even made a custom "theme" for the server pages that renders nice on the Z screen.
I can even stream music to my neighbor's PC and control the music from my Z. Now THAT'S a story!
If only the PC bios supported TCP/IP so I could safely reboot and upgrade FreeBSD PCs at work..... tell me how to do THAT (without a kvm).
And with a 233MHZ G3 a serial console is probably the fastest way to get anything done with OS X...
You should be able to get abluetooth dongle that will allow remote control functionallity. www.macosxhints is the best place to start for any technical osx knowledge.
You don't need the USB card. It ran fine on my beige without one.
Finally, a reason to port Rogue to Mac OS X!
I don't mean to be a troll here, but I have to agree with other posters that, beyond saying "I can do that", there are limited uses for this outside of a server environment. And in the server environment, Apple has the XServe, which, IIRC, has a serial console port built in.
But you gotta love that someone has done it, I guess.
The CB App. What's your 20?
OK, so the article tells us how to enable logins from a serial port. That's great, but that's really only 1/2 the battle.
For various reasons (mainly driver development in a cramped office), I like to run serial CONSOLES. This means I want to see the kernel messages on the serial port, not on a VGA monitor. This allows me to log all kernel messages, even messages from a machine which crashed (hence syslog is not running). Otherwise, its easy for important messages to scroll off screen and be lost when the system crashes.
When running linux, getting a serial console is as simple as passing some parameters to the kernel (console=ttyS0). Similar options exist for FreeBSD, Tru64, Solaris, etc. All of them will use a serial port for a console.
With OS-X, I've been able to enable some extra verbosity on the serial port, and I'm able to get
an openfirmware prompt on the serial port, but I can't figure out how to make the serial port the actual system console. I know it must be possible, because the X serves are supposed to be able to do it.
Does anybody know how to do this on a "normal" g4 with a serial port (g4port)??
At no time in Macintosh history did they have an industry-standard serial port, so you will need some kind of adapter to use a regular tty with any Macintosh.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This might answer your questions (look at section 6):
http://www.netbsd.org/
Short answer:
setenv input-device ttya
setenv output-device ttya
Actually, if we're getting pedantic (or historic in this case) the 128K, 512K, and 512KE all sported DB-9 serial ports.
Well, if we are indeed going to be getting pedantic, the mouse occupied the only DB-9 connector on the 128, so you would still be out of luck, unless you were to load a CLI-based OS on it (which I suppose you would need, if you were going to hook up terminals to it.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
But they are shaped differently than what the PC world (and most terminals) use. Round instead of trapezoidal. That means an adapter will be needed.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You would have been better served by a laptop with pcimcia wifi.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They were DB-9, but they were a completely different DB-9 than the PC uses. The pinout was definitely not an industry standard. And to the person who mentioned about the mouse, that was a third DB-9 port with yet another pinout. I think it was the opposite gender too.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft