Bob Beers wrote:

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Robert Moskowitzrgm@htt-consult.com wrote:

...

I have to reinit a firewall that can only be done from its console port, and I do not have an XP system with Hyperterminal on it.

So I went through the archive and learned that minicom could do the job for me. I installed it and went to configure it (minicom -s). I can set the speeds, but the challenge is selecting the serial device. I have a Serial-to-USB dongle, and when I connect it, the gnome hardware browser is showing a FIDI usb serial converter that was not there before connecting the dongle. But what /dev/thingee do I put into the minicom configuration?

Check dmesg, but for me it's usually /dev/ttyUSB0 when I use a USB-to-serial adapter.

Of course first I tried dmesg, and had to go through lots of output until the last lines said it is indeed ttyUSB0. Then I tried 'ls /dev/tty*' and there it was too. So I am on my way (I hope)...

thanks

Robert Heller wrote:

...

Of course first I tried dmesg, and had to go through lots of output until the last lines said it is indeed ttyUSB0. Then I tried 'ls /dev/tty*' and there it was too. So I am on my way (I hope)...

One of the really nifty tools (part of coreutils) is 'tail'. The output of dmesg (or the contents of /var/log/messages) is often large (and generally of no interest to the task at hand) and very often the info you want is in the last few lines (eg the blather generated by the Hotplug code), so it is useful to do:

% dmesg|tail

OR

% tail /var/log/messages

to get this information.

Or use 'less' for something a little more interactive: dmesg |less then you can use all the vi-style motion and search commands like G - go to end b - backwards page ?pattern<enter> - search backwards etc.