Hello,

> Related to this: I have such an adaptor at home, and have tried to
> connect an 8500/120 running NetBSD 1.6.2 to an i386 box also running
> NetBSD. I'm pretty young, so I've never had to do much with serial
> consoles, etc, and I was wondering: what are the expected commands to
> do something like this. Basically, I just want to be able to send text
> to a device on one side (echo 'yarr' > /dev/???) and read it on the
> other side (cat /dev/???).
Hey, I'm not that old either :p

> My questions:
> 
> 1. Which devices are the serial ports linked to? /dev/ttyE[0-7]?
> /dev/tty0[0-3]? Can I know which port on the back of a machine
> corresponds to which device?
/dev/tty00 is serial 0, /dev/tty01 is port 1 and so on.
ttyEn are virtual consoles, not serial interfaces.

> 2. Do serial ports work on NetBSD/macppc (I would think they should
> but I have heard that maybe they don't)?
I've never done a lot with them but they're supposed to work just fine but apparently they're unreliable at high throughput, so good enough for terminals but not for modems.

> 3. What other set up do I need to do in order to have this
> communication work? I wouldn't think I would need to do anything to
> /etc/ttys since I'm not trying to log in over a serial connection,
> just send and receive data. However, maybe I need to enable speed or
> protocol information somewhere?
/etc/ttys is for terminals connected through serial lines and pseudo terminals. I'd recommend to install minicom and play with it a little to see how things work.

have fun
Michael