I recently came across an environment where after migrating all the data from an old file server, with the introduction of a new SOE (Standard Operating Environment) the pathways to the users home drives was slightly different. I rectified this with the use of one of my all time favorite tools robocopy.

Old Home Drive Pathway: “D:\USERS\USERNAME”

New Home Drive Pathway: D:\USERS\USERNAME\MY DOCUMENTS”

Seems simple? Well it would have been if I copied everything to a my documents folder prior to the migration but after moving 500+ GB of data I needed another solution. It took a little bit of trial and error however I managed to get robocopy to create a sub folder of My Documents under each users home folder and then move the contents of the directory into the my documents folder. See the following syntax:

robocopy "D:\Users\Username" "D:\Users\Username\My Documents" /w:1 /r:1 /MOVE /e /xd "My Documents"

the switches on the command do the following:

/w:1              Wait for 1 second before retrying

/r:1                Retry once before skipping

/MOVE            Move files and directories and delete from source after copy

/e                  Copy sub directories including empty dirs

/xd                 Exclude My Documents directory

The XD switch is quite important, if you don’t include this then it could potentially cause a loop in the copy the data within my documents subfolders until the script is stopped, so be sure to test prior to executing.

So recently i finally managed to get my Aten USB to Serial adapter working with my Macbook Pro running OSX Mountain Lion. Next i was on the hunt to find something that i could actually use with the freshly installed adapter. 99% of its use is to configure Cisco switches/routers & wireless access points. I came across a few different options but found CoolTerm to be the one for me.

Written by Roger Meier, and avaliable for free over at his website. Coming from a windows background i usually used SecureCRT or Putty. Personally i liked they way that you could set up a default connection in putty with the required settings such as Baud rate, Data Bits, Parity, Stop Bits & Flow control.

On first glance it looked as though i would have to enter these settings everytime i ran the CoolTerm program, which seemed to be a bit of a drag considering it wasn't the first thing that popped up when the program was opened. However after a bit of searching around i found that it was possible.

To setup a default configuration, follow the steps below:

Open up CoolTerm
Setup the program how you like it (For me it was to the cisco specs)
Next save the connection as Default
Exit CoolTerm
Browse to the location you saved the Default connection from the previous step
Copy and paste into the location that your CoolTerm program executes. example: /Applications/CoolTermMac/Default.stc

Full credit to Martijn Pepping, over at xbsd.nl for posting this one. I am simply reposting as i found this very handy for using my Aten serial to USB converter (PL2303).

Martijn has built a kernel extension that works with OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion. You can grab the kext file here.

Installing the kext file can be done in a few easy steps:

$ download and extract $ cd /path/to/osx-pl2303.kext 
$ sudo cp -R osx-pl2303.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ 
$ next you need to fix permissions and execute bits: 
$ cd /System/Library/Extensions 
$ sudo chmod -R 755 osx-pl2303.kext 
$ sudo chown -R root:wheel osx-pl2303.kext 
$ cd /System/Library/Extensions 
$ sudo kextload ./osx-pl2303.kext 
$ sudo kextcache -system-cache

This has saved me a lot of time and effort screwing around with virtual machines and carrying around an extra windows laptop when i want to configure something like a switch or an access point through a usb - serial connection.