Who still uses serial ports? And what for?

Recently picked up an old dell system with a serial port. Haven't seen them in a while and was wondering who still uses them and what for?

Oddly enough just had to use one today to update a medical device used for measuring kidney functions. Might be able to post some pictures of it tomorrow, because it is actually very unique in regards to its update procedure.

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Some older manufacturing equipment uses RS232 communications.

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Yup, a lot of older style standalone ECU's also use serial. I actually bought an HP Elitebook 8570p because it came with a serial port so I could connect to my Hydra. Shortly after I bought a Haltech which uses USB, sooooo much faster. It would take quite some time to upload a 20 minute log over serial at I think 12 samples per second.

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I was thinking medical equipment. I've used it in a hospital setting but today it struck me as curious why consumer computers had them as well.

Serial ports aren't used very much at all in consumer gear but there are some machines that use RS232 - my 3D printer, for instance, emulates it over USB.

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Fastest way to crack open a computer at the negative hardware level and plant a rootkit or a worm. I use them in experiments.

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Not only computers, almost all of your smart appliances or electronics have some sort of serial connections to debug.

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I've seen RS232 ports on even relatively new smart TVs! Apparently it will never die. :)

Used to configure Cisco networking equipment using a Console -> Serial adapter.

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No doubt.

Everything has a serial port. There was a defcon presentation a while back ("hacking 15 devices in 20 minutes" or something) where they cracked open several IOT devices and found tx/Rx headers on PCBs of devices that had no external serial port. They got root on all of them.

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Yeah defcon 22 where they did a live demo while Int80 of Dualcore performed "Drink all the Booze Hack all the Things".
Favorite lines from that song:
"I'm just waiting until my blackberry dies
Cause I'll replace it with a raspberry pi"
and
"First we drink all the booze
Then we hack all the things
Then backdoor the firmware
On anything you bring"

demo starts around 42:30

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They're still used for console management on HP and Cisco networking devices specifically, but most firewalls and access points also have console ports that require a Serial Cable. They're very much in use today if you're a sys admin.

Beyond that specialty devices use them, I had several imaging devices at my old job that utilized them as an option, but we had EMR integration so everything went straight to a server.

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CNC mill at school still uses serial port, blazing fast 1005 Bytes/Second. Sadly upgrading it to USB 1.0 would cost almost half as much as a new one.

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If only it had that magic forward compatibility like compact flash

Still need rs232 for lab equipment. You don't throw away a 6000 USD scope that works perfectly fin because someone thought that a serial 9-pin is out of fashion lol...

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No dedicated serial ports in a long time from me. Think my P4 dell still has one.

I have heard the great MS screwed up serial in 10. Just like the CD drive decided no one needed support or drivers for something so old. Caused some problem what with the random auto uodats to 10 and then machines suddenly not working.

Our UV flatbed printer used a combination of RS232 and USB. 4 year old $170k piece of equipment, still runs a null modem DE-9 to the PC.

Virtually all networking equipment has a console port which you can connect to a serial port on your computer or via an adapter.

It's useful for diagnosing the equipment as it will let you see what's happening in pre-boot or if you lock yourself out during a software upgrade or through configuration.

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I use them semi regularly as a sysadmin. Many of the appliances we have (webfilter, antispam, ...) have serial ports and all of our network gear has them as well (Cisco).
We just removed some old SUN SPARC servers, that had only serial IPMI/ILO boards (remote management if the server is down/...) and a terminal to network switch to access these ports over the network.

Our firewalls and switches are on this too, so you don't have to run to the DC every time the switch is down. I even got a bunch of adapters, male to male, RJ45? to female serial and a bunch more to deal with the different serial ports.

None of our "active" laptops has RS232 anymore, we use USB to RS232 adapters. But there is an old Dell (Inspiron 600?) in a cupboard somewhere if the USB adapters fail.

My pfsense box at home is a "pc engines apu2c4" and the only output is via RS232... But this is only needed for setup once.