Tuesday, March 16, 2010

OS X:Terminal Break for Serial Console on OS X

May 15, 2009 by Greg Ferro · 3 Comments 

This Post is Part of a Series — click for list on Console Mastery»

In a pre­vi­ous post Serial Console on OS X I wrote about how to con­nect a USB-​​Serial con­verter to con­sole into Cisco router and use the ‘screen’ command.

To per­form a pass­word recov­ery on a Cisco router you need to issue a “ter­minal break” char­ac­ter to inter­rupt the boot pro­cess. The Cisco page on ter­minal break shows a lot of break sequences.

The break sequence for “screen” is to use Ctrl-​​A and then Ctrl-​​B. The Ctrl-​​A shifts the focus back to the screen pro­cess (away from the serial con­sole) and the Ctrl-​​B issues the break sequence.

You may need to break more than once. This is done by Ctrl-​​A, Ctrl-​​B, Ctrl-​​B, Ctrl-​​B.

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Comments

3 Responses to “OS X:Terminal Break for Serial Console on OS X”
  1. Dmitri says:

    …and if it works for you — you’re lucky, because not very many USB to Serial adapters pass “break”.

  2. I believe that the prob­lem with break on OSX is with Prolific driver. You may wish to try open source one. I had no luck with it (didn’t handle large buf­fers when past­ing) and I’m stuck with Prolific driver.

  3. Gary Smith says:

    I think it does depend on the chip­set of the con­ver­tor — I’ve got a PL2303 based unit here and I’ve been strug­gling to find a way to issue a break with it. I don’t believe it’s pos­sible to do, although there’s been many rumours about the func­tion­al­ity being added in to a later release of the driver.

    Cheers,

    Gary Smith

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