A friend of mine asked me to troubleshoot a problem he was having with authenticating to an SSH server. Like most problems, the answer could be found buried in logs, or in this case, debug output. For those who use SSH and don’t know about -v, it time you learnt about this wonderful switch. In the UNIX world, -v usually denotes verbostiy, that is, the level of detail that the program will display. Most programs you run from the command line support -v, and often -vv and -vvv. The more v’s, the higher the level of verbosity.

Start up an SSH session from the command line:

ssh username@host -v
ssh username@host -vv
ssh username@host -vvv

If you aren’t using -v while troubleshooting, try it out, it will make your life a whole lot easier.

Posted on December 15th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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Thanks to all that attended my presentation on Monitoring with Nagios at the OSDC 2005 conference. You can download the slides from “Monitoring Anything and Everything with Nagios” here.

I’ve also just uploaded my first pre-release copy of a new free eBook called “The Nagios Book”. The book walks through setting up a Nagios server from scratch. There are a few areas that need content, but it still might help some people, even in it’s current form. I will be working on the eBook and accompanying website NagiosBook.org over the next week or two. If you’re interested in Nagios, visit NagiosBook.org now and check out the pre-release version. Feel free to send me your feedback.

Posted on December 13th, 2005 to catagory: Talks
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There are now devices (or at least more of them) that provide native OS X drivers, so this document is now slightly redundant. See http://keyspan.com:16080/products/usa19hs/ for example.

After purchasing the Targus USB to Serial (PA088) Adapter, I found that the driver included was for Windows only. I needed this to work under OS X 10.4. After searching the Targus website, I found out that this device is only compatible with Windows. Hmmm.

This adapter is made for newer hardware that doesn’t come with serial ports. There are several adapters (or converters) on the market, the Targus PA088 Adapter was the only one I could find at a nearby shopping center. It took some trial and error, but here’s how I managed to get it working under OS X.

First I downloaded the Magic Control driver from the MCT website:

http://www.mct.com.tw/driver.html

It appears this link is no longer valid.

Thanks to Mitch for finding the file, you can download a copy here.

Please note, this probably won’t work with newer Apple hardware, it was originally performed on a PPC PowerBook a few years ago.

Then I edited the plist file installed by the driver:

vi /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist

Then I replaced the following 2 ID’s, by those found in System Profiler (under USB):

idProduct
230
idVendor
711

I then changed the permissions to 755 on all the files under (I compared this to the other drivers) the driver folder:

/System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext

Then, I ran kextload, and it worked:

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext loaded successfully

You should now see a new serial device appear in /dev:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 2, 0 Dec 6 21:15 tty
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 8 Dec 6 18:54 tty.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 6 Dec 6 18:54 tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 2 Dec 6 21:16 tty.USB Serial
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 0 Dec 6 18:54 tty.modem
crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 0 Dec 6 18:54 ttyp0
crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 1 Dec 6 21:50 ttyp1


You can now access the serial port via /dev/tty.USB Serial ala UNIX!

Posted on December 6th, 2005 to catagory: Articles
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