Finally, a Real Serial Console for the Mac

I’ve been searching high and low. ZTerm is extinct, screen kinda sucks with scrolling. So what do I have left?

I attempted to write a script in Python to turn the serial port into a local socket so I could use Telnet but I couldn’t seem to get past opening the serial port.

After some searching, I found MultiCom. It does exactly what I wanted – turns my serial port into a local socket. Works prefect!

Anyway, if you have time, help me with this script. It’s fairly simple and still incomplete, but I can’t get past fixing what blocks the open() calls to /dev/tty.PL2303-0000101D.

Update: I managed to figure out why my script didn’t work; I should have used /dev/cu.* instead of /dev/tty.*. I also found that MultiCom doesn’t work with Cisco devices due to an odd Cisco behavior. Read this blog entry for more info.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, socket

dev = '/dev/tty.PL2303-0000101D'
bind = '127.0.0.1'
port = 8023
buff = 4096

fr = open(dev, 'rb', 0)
print "Read FD open"
fw = open(dev, 'wb', 0)
print "Write FD open"

ss = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

print "Listening on port", port
ss.bind((bind, port))
ss.listen(1)

print "Waiting for socket"
(cs, ca) = ss.accept()
print "Got socket"
ss.close()

print "Forking"
pid = os.fork()

# child
if pid == 0:
  print "In child"
  while 1:
    s = os.read(fr, buff)
    if not s: break
    print "Read serial:", s
    cs.sendall(s)
  close(fr)
  exit(0)

# parent
else:
  print "In parent"
  while 1:
    s = cs.recv(buff)
    if not s: break
    print "Read net:", s
    os.write(fw, s)
  close(fw)
  os.wait(pid)
  cs.close()
  exit(0)