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Gene MoodyFlag for United States of America

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Mount USB-to-Serial Adaptor in VMWare ESCX 2.5.3?

Hi Experts,

A while back*, we discovered that VMWare only supports USB 1.1 - fair enough.  We enabled a backup proxy, and all is good once again.  However, we have a new wrinkle:

The Serial port on the same server died (mysteriously) leaving us "out of touch" with the (door) Access Control Systems.  VMWare tells us (from the XP box's window) that it's sending data to the port, but the port just isn't functioning any longer.

So we decided to replace the port - no good, nobody makes that particular part for that particular (Dell) server any more --- so maybe we can employ a USB-to-Serial solution?  Radio Shack sells 'em, so we got one, plugged it in.

And that's as far as it's gone.  Naturally, while we've been debugging this issue, Access Card change requests have been backing up.  So pressure is building.

Previously, I just redirected/configured the existing serial port in the VMX file - I figure that will still work, but I need for VMWare to see the device first, and figure out which device that is in /dev/usb/??? to make it all work.

If the USB-Serial interface is already "happy", I don't know how to tell: I cannot access it - and I'll claim ignorance if it will help.  I just don't know what to do, how to tell if it's being seen, and if not, how to *make* it "get seen" so we can resolve this issue and move forward.

Help!  For the last year, everything has run absolutely fine!  I'm not sure where to run with this...

Thank you for your time and trouble!


* A while back = https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/23560672/Mount-USB-for-backups-only-in-VMWare-ESX-2-5-3.html?sfQueryTermInfo=1+mount+usb
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davismisbehavis
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I'm going to go out on a limb here,  has the ESX host been rebooted so that it can read in the USB connector on boot up?  Sounds silly but I'm pretty sure that ESX has no plug and play capabilities in the same way as windows does.
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Well, from previous experience, it "knew" when we plugged in the Terabyte HD, so I think it must have some rudimentary capacity.

But since it is a production server, I'll need to get in early tomorrow morning and perform said reboot.

I just don't know.

Thanks for the prompt answer, though!  :P
It's worth a try, in IT they often say 90% of problems are resolved through reboots, lets hope this isn't one of the 10%
No reboot yet, following upper management's pleas.

     ...but that doesn't mean we cannot make progress...


dmesg reports the following:

hub.c: USB new device connect on bus 1/2 assigned device number 2
hub.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x1453/0x4026) is not claimed by any active driver.


lsusb doesn't appear to exist on this VMWare distro, but I can safely bet that the USB-to-Serial Adapter wouldn't show up in the list, anyway.  No driver.

So I guess we need to find a driver to service the device?  This could be tricky, as most manufacturers either follow the Mac or winDoze: I believe that only HP officially recognizes that Linux boxes exist.

Does anybody know where one might find a Linux driver capable of servicing a Radio Shack USB-to-Serial Adapter?  I known they have the (buried, hidden) driver for Windows 9x, XP, Vista-32 at http://support.radioshack.com/soft.htm - but (naturally) neither Linux (nor any other 64-bit platform) is supported.


I figure at this point I either need to find a USB-to-Serial Adapter supported by Linux, or find a way to register a generic driver to the vendor/product ID that will make it work...
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Gene Moody
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