1 Welcome to the Mac OS X Installation Guide This document describes the procedure for installing the Mac OS X FTDIUSBSerial driver for FTDI's FT2232C, FT232BM, FT245BM, FT8U232AM and FT8U245AM devices. The driver is available for free download from the Drivers section of the FTDIâ¬webâ¬site. The USB-C ports on modern MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and MacBook are the only connections you have on your laptop and you need them to work for you at all times. This becomes even more important if you're using a USB-C hub so you can connect other peripherals and accessories to your Mac. Can anyone tell me how to disable all usb-ports on OSX 10.10 (Yosemite)? We've got a large number of iMacs setup, where we don't want the user to be able to control/use USB ports. In previous OSX. Block or Disable USB Port on Mac OS X by unloading the Kernel Extension. USB storage devices can also be blocked or disabled by unloading the USB storage input /output kernel extension (.Kext file ).The USB kext on OS X is loaded at the time of start of the system, this can be loaded / unloaded using kextload or kextunload command.
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USB is the most convenient device used for transferring your files from one device to another. USB ports on Mac usually work smoothly but sometimes an error can be seen there as well. It is an amazing and flawless machine that is way better than a simple computer but itâs a machine at the end. So, the machine may always have issues. Here we have some important solutions for the Mac users to follows if they find their USB ports stop working.
First, you need to make sure where the problem is. There can be a connection issue when USB itself fails to connect the Mac. We need to start from the basics to make sure your USB works fine. The simplest way to find out whether the USB port is working or not, connect some other USB to the Mac. If that USB device works then your problem isnât Mac, itâs your USB which causing troubles.
You should also check if there is any kind of dust in the ports of Mac. If dust is there, you can use a soft cloth to make it clean. Itâs quiet helping.
Sometimes, the problem can be there only in one port of the system. You can try other ports of the Mac to check if they are working properly or not. If they are working that means it is a single port that has any sort of problems. On the other hand, you can check your USB device on other Mac systems to clarify whether it is Okay or not. You can use a keyboard and mouse to check the port. There can be a manufacturing defect in one port of the system, so you can use other port and repair the faulty one later.
There is another thing that you can do and that is help through device manager.
This can work in your case. This solution is suggested by many Mac users, so you should try this one.
You donât even know how many bugs you can solve by just restarting your system. It is the easiest thing to do. When you restart your Mac, it clears the memory and hep better after restarting. Follow these steps to restart your Mac.
After restarting, try to connect your USB and see what happens. It solves most of the Mac problems. If it doesnât work, follow next solutions.
Updating or resting SMC (System Management Controller) is a pretty good option to try. It is straightforward and the easiest thing to do.
Hopefully, this solution can work as many of the users having Mac tried this thing to resolve port issues and they succeeded. You can try this solution manual for your case. It does not only resolve USB port issues, but it can also help you in solving other issues like gaming card issues etc. Donât try this again and again, if you donât get your required results then you better leave it.
Resting PRAM/NVRAM can resolve the issue as USB ports contain different data like data related to the mouse, keyboard and trackpad. So, ports can behave confusingly as well. Hereâs how you can reset NVRAM on Mac.
If it works, that is good for us. If it doesnât, donât repeat the process again and again. It can harm your Mac if youâre not an expert.
Updating your Mac is another useful way to get things working properly. It is a reasonably good idea to sort things out. Updating Mac isnât a difficult process. Follow these steps
This can surely work. So, updating your Mac doesnât harm your Mac. It can help you in having more features as well.
The above-mentioned solutions are suggested by many trusted users of Mac. They tried these to overcome USB port issues. So, you can try them step by step and check. Hopefully, these can work in almost 90 % cases. If any of these solutions donât work at all then your Mac is up for something else. You need to consult the developers or experts for resolving your issue. Good Luck and be safe always!
One of two things is generally meant by this, either using a Mac as the interface to a serial device (accomplished by running a terminal emulator program on the Mac), or using another machine to connect to the Mac over serial and accessing the shell provided by the Mac. This page is dedicated to the latter.
I first tried googling around, and I encountered a few references to this issue on various Mac forums. Many were quite old, and it appears that the process has gotten more difficult with more recent versions of OS X (at least Snow Leopard 10.5+). People have generally had more success with the Xserve OS X server versions. I was working with 10.6, non-server edition. The technique described here has been reported to work at least as recently as 10.10.4.
For completeness, here are some links to several of the sites I encountered, which should give you the basic idea of the problem:
Getting a serial port
The first step is to get an RS232 serial port on your Mac, which hasn't been built-in for a long, long time. You probably want a USB to serial converter, of which there are a variety. Given variability in driver quality and compatibility, you may want to try a few models and driver implementation. For instance, two common chips include the FTDI series (official driver here) and the Prolific PL2303 chipset (open source driver here, closed source driver here). Of the two, I found the open source PL2303 driver to be slow and observed occasional data corruption (I did not try the closed source driver but heard worse things). I have found FTDI devices to perform more consistently.
Mac OS X 10.9 and belowThese versions do not come with drivers for any USB to serial converter of which I am aware. You will need to install a third-party driver, e.g. from one of the above links.Mac OS X 10.10 and above
Starting with 10.10, a driver for at least FTDI-based converters now ships with the OS. Drivers for other converters may also be present, but I have not used them.
If you are lucky enough to have a converter identifying itself using one of the common FTDI USB product IDs, then the serial device will simply appear. If not, you will have to alter the expected device ID in the driver configuration. If you encounter strange issues of any kind with the built-in driver, try the official FTDI driver as well. Supposedly, the driver priority of the built-in driver is set so that installing the official driver will override it without causing any conflicts, however I have not conclusively verified this. For an example of how to alter the device ID or disable the built-in driver (follow just step 1), see this blog post. For official documentation on manipulating the FTDI driver or uninstalling it, see FTDI Application Note 134.
In the process of doing this myself, I learned a bit about the kernel extension (of which these drivers are each an instance) system in OS X. The basic idea is that each has a [drivername].kext directory somewhere under /System/Library/Extensions or /Library/Extensions, which if removed or renamed to not end with .kext (e.g. by switching .kext with .disabled) will prevent the driver from being loaded in the future. For an immediate load or unload, run kextload [path to .kext directory] or kextunload [path to .kext directory] as root. To see the list of currently installed extensions, run kextstat (e.g. | grep -i ftdi). After re-enabling a driver, the driver may not reload even after the next reboot because a separate cache of kernel extensions is kept to speed up enumeration on boot. This can be manipulated directly by the kextcache program, or more easily by simply running touch /System/Library/Extensions (which updates its timestamp to the current time) so that the cache is rebuilt on next boot.
Testing your serial port
If you have this working, a new device file should show up in /dev. Run ls /dev/tty.* to see what yours is showing up as. The next step is to test the serial port using some sort of terminal emulation program. I used goSerial, which happened to be the first one I found. It worked fine for my purposes, but better ones may exist.
Getting a getty running
In the Unix world, getty is the program that presents a login prompt. In earlier versions of Mac OS, one could add the appropriate line to /etc/ttys and have a prompt appear on a serial port. It appears that as of 10.6 (and possibly somewhat earlier), this is no longer possible.
Instead, I found that creating a script to spawn the getty that is run by launchd does the trick. Note that running the getty on the command line appears to fail because the login_tty syscall can only be invoked by the init process (which on Mac OS is launchd). I therefore created a file called serialconsole.plist (name it as you wish) in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ containing the following:
Note that first bit sets the daemon name, the second bit sets the program arguments (one 'string' per argument), and the last bit (keepalive) instructs launchd to restart the daemon when it exits (eg, the user logs out of the console). The first program argument is the getty program to execute, the second is the relevant line in /etc/gettytab that defines the desired serial port configuration (in this case the typical 115200 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit; '8N1'), and the third argument to getty must be the name of the serial port device in /dev, which for the two devices I had were one of the two listed. As noted later, the 'cu.' version of the serial port rather than the 'tty.' version may need to be used. Initially, this was reported in only some cases but seems to be the norm as of 10.10
Using the program launchctl, you can manually reload these configuration files and restart daemons. Here are some self-explanatory commands you might use, of which only the first two should be necessary to start the getty manually after creating the configuration file above.
Of course, rebooting should also work if you're lazy. Note that in my case, the usb serial device appears in /devafter launchd attempts to run the getty, causing an error message to be logged to this effect in /var/log/system.log. However, the next time it attempts to restart it (within a minute or so), it should succeed. Check that log file for other errors.
As of 10.10, launchctl load and launchctl unload are considered legacy (but still supported for now), and a new scheme should be used. Supposedly the following is the preferred sequence:
However, in my case these did not seem to be sufficient, whereas launchctl load did the trick. Let me know what seems to work for you.
Automatic login
For my application, I wanted a shell prompt to be immediately presented, without asking for username or password or displaying the login messages (last time logged in, new mail, etc.). To accomplish this, I needed to add the following entry to /etc/gettytab:
as well as change the std.115200 to custom.115200 in the serialconsole.plist file. Note that this changes the login banner message to just a carriage return and newline, automatically logs in as user <username>, and spawns the login program /usr/bin/quietlogin.sh, which is a script I wrote (that wraps the default /usr/bin/login) containing the following:
The reason this additional script was required was due to stupidity on the part of the login program that I observed. First, it seems to ignore the presence of a .hushlogin in the user's home directory requesting that no welcome messages be printed. Further, the -f argument passed to login must be first on the command line (before a '-q' which forces quite mode). (See the login man page for some of idea of what I'm talking about.) The above script performs this necessary munging.
Hiccups
Things not working? I'm not a mac user myself, so I can't offer too much help with debugging. Serial stuff in Mac OS appears to be of little interest to Apple, so things may change and break with each new version. If you learn something new during your own tinkering, let me know and I'll post it here. My email address may be derived from the URL of this document.
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If you're using the 'tty' device and it's not working, definitely try the 'cu' device (replacing tty.<device name> with cu.<devicename>, thus using the 'cu' call-out device instead of 'tty' terminal device). This was first reported when using somewhat unusual hardware as a Hackintosh, but more recent reports suggest this is now the norm. Perhaps it depends on the usb-to-serial driver used? I'm seeking input on this, so send me email with datapoints.
Other thoughts
One reader suggested the possibility of using serial port emulation on a bluetooth connection as an alternative to USB-to-serial dongles. I would be curious to hear reports from anyone attempting this, particularly on behavior prior to bluetooth peering, during radio hiccups, and after reconnects (assuming the idea works at all). Before going too far down this road, do remember you can run IP over bluetooth and just use proper networking if your application permits.
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Last modified 8/9/2015
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