This is just a quick blog entry so I don't forget something quite important. I had a great deal of trouble finding a decent and free terminal emulator for Mac OS X that would work nicely with my loan Nokia IP380, and to be honest, it's held me up, and annoyed me long enough, to warrant a blog.
I've got Mac OS X 10.5.6, a Nokia firewall device, and I need to connect to the Nokia's serial port so I can do initial setup, much in the same way you would connect to a Cisco device and run through the setup.
1) Getting the drivers for the USB - Serial adapter
I didn't know who the heck made the silicon in my USB to serial adapter, so first port of call is Apple System Profiler to find out who made it. As you can see below, System Profiler resolve the Vendor ID to Prolific Technology Inc. Nice. So a google later, and I had a Mac OS X driver for the device.
System Profiler
Prolific PL-2303 Mac OS X driver
2) Figuring out the 'device' that relates to the serial port
As you know, Mac OS X is quite a bit UNIXy, and as such, it doesn't talk about COM ports, or all that non-sense. The serial port is represented to applications by /dev/tty.usbserial. To check the driver is loaded, take a look in /dev for anything called 'usb'. When the USB to serial adapter us plugged in you should see cu.usbseral and tty.usbserial. When you pull the adapter out, they will disappear.
3) Installing Kermit You can install Kermit either from pre-compiled binaries (try google) or by using Darwin Ports with the 'port install kermit' command. I would say that the pre-compiled binary is the easiest if you can find one, with Darwin Ports taking a little while to set up. Regardless my preference is to use Darwin Ports simply because you then have access to a massive amount of other Unix software. 4) Making it work Bring up a terminal and run the following: kermit set line /dev/tty.usbserial set carrier-watch off connect Ta-da! Setting up Kermit Accessing IPSO Final Thoughts A couple of things. Firstly, USB to Serial adapters are low power devices, so you can use the USB connector on your keyboard for added convenience. Secondly, and whilst we can use Kermit as a simple terminal emulator, we can also use it's powerful scripting features. It's not unreasonable to write a scripts that build a Nokia device from scratch, or connect to multiple Nokia devices and audit their configuration.
