serial port as console linux/OSX question

[John Jetmore]

I have some questions about how serial ports work on the mac.  These are
more general mac questions, but I thought some people here might know.

At work we have a mixed bag of sun/solaris servers and intel/linux
servers.  The sun servers run a console login on the serial port
automatically with no intervention.  The linux servers we have figured out
how to run through the serial port also, using grub options to get the
startup text displayed there, and using init to spawn a listening
login process once the machine has come up.

>From there it's just a stardard db9 connector that we can connect to a
wyse terminal, a terminal server, the serial port on a windows machine,
etc, and control the machine remotely.

So, I assume that I can do this same think w/ linux on the mac,
software-wise.  My question is what kind of cable to use, what are the
pinouts, etc.  Is there such a thing as an apple serial to db9 serial
cable?  Are the settings still 96008n1?

Additionally, I would really love to be able to attach to this serial port
from a USB based machine running either OS9 or OSX.  How do I do this?  Is
it even possible?  On a windows machine I would use COM1 and hyperterminal
to connect to it.  On a *nix machine I might use kermit or something
similar.  Is there something similar on a USB based machine?  Is there
such a thing as a USB-apple serial connector?

Anyway, any kicks in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
--John

       ______________________________________________________________
        John Jetmore  **  jj33@pobox.com  **  http://pobox.com/~jj33