Finisar makes some great products — their SFPs are rebadged and used in many devices, and we use their ProbeFCXs extensively.
I’m not much a fan of waiting for my Wintel box to boot up or wake up, and it needs so many additional things to work: an extra trackball because the touchpad sucks, needs a wart on the bottom for a serial connector, needs much bigger power connector with extra internationalization tools to connect to foreign power sockets, etc. I fear when I’m on a client’s site, and the serial port in the wart doesn’t work… like a week and a half ago: I had to borrow a laptop to connect to the devices, which wasn’t very professional. I decided I’d find an alternative, and my Mac just always works.
I wanted a way to connect to one using my Mac OSX-10.6.1. The following works:
- install osx-pl2303 with this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/files/osx-pl2303/0.3.1/osx-pl2303-0.3.1-10.4-universal.dmg/download
- OK, I rebooted rather than load the driver from the command-line.
- You can plug in your device and check for the driver using
kextstat
— mine showsnl.bjaelectronics.driver.PL2303 (1.0.0d1)
- connect using the cable that works on your Wintel to the PL2303 device (mine’s a GUC232A made in China)
- Mac OSX comes with the
screen
tool, so I usedscreen /dev/cu.PL2303-00002006 57600
- works fine
This process might work just as well on a Wintel, and is a smaller device to carry.
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