Posts Tagged Serial
Prolific USB to Serial Adapters
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on April 30, 2009
What’s the deal with these things? It seems like no matter how hard I try, I can never get one to actually work with the device that i’m using. I’ve successfully managed to make it work with an old serial swipe card reader, but that’s about it!
It also seems like completely uninstalling the Windows drivers is an impossibility. I have three different USB to Serial adapters, all made by different vendors, all using the same Prolific PL2303 chipset. The installed drivers work for ONE of them. No amount of deleting ghosted devices or clearing USB IDs out of the registry can make the other two work correctly. I’ve even tried forcing them onto the older versions of the drivers with no luck. It’s just disaster after disaster with these things, yet it seems like everyone is using this same chip set.
Yet another piece of terrible driver software accompanied by bad hardware. Any recommendations for a good USB to Serial adapter would certainly be appreciated! If anyone is into the aquarium scene and has used one with an Aquatronica controller, that would be even more helpful. Sad irony, Aquatronica sells a PL2303 based USB to Serial adapter and i’d say success rates are abysmal. I see LOTS of people complaining about them not working. At least i’m not alone!
LikeLong live the serial port! The original “Terminal Services”.
Posted by ekrunch in Technology on February 9, 2008
Occasionally in life, I am reminded of the reasons why I believe what I believe. I have always believed that UNIX and Linux are unstoppable server OS’es and the only choice for hardcore enterprise duties. Maintenance required is very little (if any) and they’re easy to manage remotely. Windows administrators will argue about the lack of a cool global policy editor (which is admittedly very cool) or a remote GUI tool as fast and usable as Remote Desktop/Terminal Services. Those are very valid arguments… but let me tell you about one thing they don’t have. A decent serial port administrative interface…
For those of you who didn’t notice, the ID server bombed out the other day. I was at a customer and unable to get to the internet to fix it. It was out for around 8 hours! When I finally did get to a machine with SSH access, the server was apparently down. I couldn’t ping it, none of the sites were up, etc… So then I SSH’ed over to the serial terminal server that’s connected to my machine. Sure enough, the machine is up and running, it was the upstream DHCP server that had given me the wrong IP address. Something went very wrong on that subnet and i’m not sure exactly what. The point is that I got to the machine via a serial port and fixed it. Everything but GUI is available via that serial port, not a reduced subset of commands.
Gotta love UNIX and Linux. The legacy of the serial terminal has saved my tail so many times it’s not even worth counting any more. Try that with your Windows box! You might also want to factor in that this machine has been down only twice in over 5 years. Once for an OS upgrade and once because of an upstream problem. How’s that for reliability and track record?
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