What is the best way to discover what USB drives are connected, where they are mounted, and their unique details like Serial number, PID and which USB Hub port they are connected to? Something similar to what USBlyzer does for Windows but programmatically.
You can use Terminal and execute:
system_profiler SPUSBDataType
It will show all connected USB devices, with detailed information.
The Finder has an "about this mac" option under the Apple at the upper left. Ask for more info and follow the devices===> USB tree to find your answers. In a shell or another executing module, I have no idea how to retrieve this info.
USB Prober is the most useful tool. It can be found at /Developer/Applications/Utilities/USB Prober.
I'm not an expert of I/O on Mac OS X, but I've heard of I/O Kit, which may be a good starting point.
Related
I am newbie of Mac OS X.
Recently I have a task to develop a software which can
Enumerate thunderbolt devices.
Detects attachment/removal of thunderbolt devices.
I have found a sample program called 'USBPrivateDataSample' for USB in Apple's HP.
However, there's no sample program or any hint about thunderbolt.
I have the following questions:
Is it necessary to develop device driver to do the task I mentioned?
If question 1. is no. How to achieve this goal? Through IOKit?
How a thunderbolt device be presented in system? PCIe device?
Thank you very much.
You can monitor attachment/removal of Thunderbolt devices by Monitoring the I/O Registry for IOEthernetInterface entries. It’s relatively easy to filter out Thunderbolt networking (I’m not sure what the best option is, but an easy option is to look for “ThunderboltIP” in the “IOModel” property of the parent IOEthernetController).
I have achieved what you desire to do and also wrote a peice of code. Here is the link
Monitor changes on Thunderbolt port connection
May be this, helps you out.
How can I monitor all USB traffic on OSX? I downloaded the USB monitoring extensions from the Apple Dev website and ran USB Prober. Nothing shows up when I start the monitoring, and there is data being sent to and from the USB device while monitoring.
I found 2 similar topics on this site, but neither gave an answer aside from using libusb. I was hoping I wouldn't have to write my own monitor from scratch using libusb. Seeing as the questions were asked in 2010, I'm hoping tools have been developed since then to accomplish this on OSX.
It's possible in high sierra (and maybe older versions), you'll need Wireshark's nightly build (I am using V2.5.0rc0). After you install it, you'll need to bring up the USB "interface":
sudo ifconfig XHC20 up
And after that you can use wireshark to sniff all the traffic in the XHC20 interface. When you finish, remember to turn the interface down:
sudo ifconfig XHC20 down
Source: aud-ios.
USB Prober doesn't log all USB traffic. It only logs USB/HID driver messages (diagnostic/info messages posted by USB/HID drivers).
I've never tried libusb for this but I suspect that it can't capture all USB traffic ether (but I could be wrong).
If you're at all serious about monitoring USB traffic you should consider a hardware USB Protocol Analyzer like the Beagle 12 from Total Phase: http://www.totalphase.com/products/beagle_usb12/
Or the USB Explorer 200 from Ellisys: http://www.ellisys.com/products/usbex200/index.php
You might be interested in contributing to this kickstarted project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bushing/openvizsla-open-source-usb-protocol-analyzer?ref=card
usbtracer is included in USB Prober.app:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/qa/qa1370/_index.html
no HTML anchors there, so search for
"Where do I find the usbtracer tool and how can I use it?"
i don't know if it shows all traffic or not, but at least in my case it shows something, and USB Prober shows nothing
I have a USB web camera from ViMicro that contains a GPIO chip. We have a microswitch wired to one of the IO pins and can read the status of the switch on Windows using an ActiveX control that was provided by ViMicro, named exvmuvc.ax. I need to duplicate this functionality using IOKit on OS X.
USBTrace from SysNucleus displays the conversation happening between the Windows system and the USB device, but I cannot duplicate this on the Mac.
Does anyone know of a software USB sniffer, like USBTrace, that works on OS X so that I can compare the packets? Also, is anyone familiar with this particular camera chip and its GPIO subsystem, even on Linux?
You could use usbtracer from Xcode, or you can try using using USB Prober with a debug release of IOUSBFamily, this will most likely output more information than you actually want. You may want to look at qa1370 for more information.
In general though, I'd recommend you get a hardware USB analyzer, they make this sort of thing much easier.
I'm using Ruby 1.8 and linux (Ubuntu and SLAX), and i need to write a script in ruby which finds out if some specific usb device is connected to the system and on which USB port (0,1,2, etc). It was done before with the help of HAL (hal-find-by-capability --capability serial), but now i can't use this approach. I was trying to read /var/log/messages file trying to find the number of the usb port, but it appears that this number may not be written in some systems. Other thing i tried is to check /dev folder and search for ttyUSB# file, but it doesn't appear on some system when new device connects to USB.
I would appreciate any ideas how to do this.
lsusb is a linux command for displaying your usb hubs and listing the devices that are connected to them. In ruby I believe you'd be able to do something like this:
ls_results = `lsusb`
You should be able to parse that for whatever device you're looking for.
I'm sorry that I couldn't provide you an ruby sample. I had the same problem in C / C++ (QT). You can find my snippet here:
http://www.known-issues.net/cpp/how-to-detect-if-dev-is-a-usb-device.html
You have libusb ruby bindings which allow to control usb devices.
I'd like to modify a USB driver to send and receive USB data over a network.
Take for example, an iMac and a PC. I have an iPod plugged in to my PC (in NY). I want my iMac (in LA) to recognize the iPod as plugged in to a local USB port and be able to communicate with the iPod.
Forget my qualifications, or lack thereof (I have background in web, iOS apps, I've toyed with Java and C).
Where can I get source code for a USB driver for Windows that I can modify? Mac OS?
Any tips or pointers towards accomplishing my goal would be appreciated as well.
It looks like folks are coming up with something close to what you want. If you do decide to roll your own, the USB driver source you asked for is libusb.
On the Mac OS X end, drivers are built up in a stack. What you want to do should be relatively simple (nothing is really simple in kernel land). You need to create a driver that can communicate over ethernet with the PC and looks like a USB device to the driver matching software. Then everything else will happen automatically.
The source code is available for Apple's USB stack. You should also read about the IOKit API and IOKit device driver guidelines and IOKit fundamentals.
Oh yes and you say you have toyed with Java and C. To write device drivers on OS X, you'll need to learn some C++.
I suggest you to go see USBIP project. This is available on Linux and Windows, but not clear for MAC. If you can get a VHCI-Controller driver installed for MAC, we can kick start USBIP for MAC.
Sounds quite like this product, a bit unsure if theirs works over wide-area networks though.
I have a general idea of how I'd go about it, but not any specifics. Basically, I'd use the platform's driver development kit to write a USB device emulator on the client machine. I'd then add a virtual device to that system called "Networked USB Host", or something similar that maintains an open port to listen for communication from the server and passes it on to your virtual USB device. IIRC, the Windows DDK comes with a USB simulation framework that might be able to help you with this.
On the server, you'd have to hook into the USB subsystem to send raw USB packets to the client machine. libpcap and wireshark have USB capturing facilities for that, but I'm not sure if this works with winpcap and the Windows version of wireshark as well.
EDIT: Look at this for cross-platform USB capture alternatives.
You can buy OSR USB learning kit: https://www.osronline.com/custom.cfm?name=index_fullframeset.cfm&pageURL=https://www.osronline.com/store/index.cfm
This is actually small USB device with known interface. Windows Driver Kit (WDK) contains sample KMDF driver for this device: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/wdk/
This is good starting point to learn Windows Drivers development, and USB drivers development specifically. However, it is still far away from your problem solution.
Can't you use some sort of Remote Desktop?