[rescue] Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]

[Nadine Miller]

On Aug 21, 2008, at 9:57 AM, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 09:49:56AM -0400, John Floren wrote:
>
>> I think I could probably deal with losing the parallel port (Goodbye,
>> dot-matrix printer) but the worst thing is the way it's getting  
>> harder
>> to get real serial ports. As with these parallel ports, the serial
>> hardware is on the motherboard, there's just nowhere to connect a
>> cable. They tell us to use USB to serial converters, but I do a lot  
>> of
>> debugging with serial consoles on Plan 9, and USB-serial doesn't work
>> so well there :(
>
> It seems to me that there have to be some good USB serial dongles
> somewhere, and that someone should know what they are.
>
> Lots of people claim that keyspan is the best, and it appears they  
> don't
> use the same chips as everyone else.  Can anyone verify what is  
> better?

I only have experience with Keyspan; we used these with OS X 10.0 &  
Mac OS 9 @ large multinational console game company with our Mac  
laptops to connect to Cisco gear using ZTerm.  The network engineer  
(Mac guy from way back) claimed the Keyspan was the only one he'd ever  
gotten to work reliably.

=Nadine=