Recently had cause to do this, and it's not as simple as you may imagine.
Firstly, you till need the serial <> Cisco port cable, and to connect to that a USB<>serial cable to plug into your machine.
There are 2 main chips in the USB<> Serial cable world, FTDI and Prolific. OSX has a native FTDI driver built in from 10.9 onwards, so you can use Terminal if you buy one of these. If you purchase a Prolific cable, then you will need serial emulation software - the very best that I've come across is called 'Serial' in the App store. It's dead good. But quite expensive (£29, or £24 from their website).
That said, if you buy FTDI chip, you won't need it. The cables are all roughly the same price, about £10.
Connect everything up, turn the switch on, open terminal and check that the cable has been identified by typing:
$ls /dev/tty.*
then
$screen /dev/tty.device_name 9600
Press enter, and should see a prompt of some description.
Hope this helps someone avoid a load of nonsense troubleshooting before getting to the interesting stuff!
Firstly, you till need the serial <> Cisco port cable, and to connect to that a USB<>serial cable to plug into your machine.
There are 2 main chips in the USB<> Serial cable world, FTDI and Prolific. OSX has a native FTDI driver built in from 10.9 onwards, so you can use Terminal if you buy one of these. If you purchase a Prolific cable, then you will need serial emulation software - the very best that I've come across is called 'Serial' in the App store. It's dead good. But quite expensive (£29, or £24 from their website).
That said, if you buy FTDI chip, you won't need it. The cables are all roughly the same price, about £10.
Connect everything up, turn the switch on, open terminal and check that the cable has been identified by typing:
$ls /dev/tty.*
then
$screen /dev/tty.device_name 9600
Press enter, and should see a prompt of some description.
Hope this helps someone avoid a load of nonsense troubleshooting before getting to the interesting stuff!