I have an old rack server which I want to set up. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare monitor I can use with it, so I want to connect to it via the serial port it has. I don't, however, have a serial port on my laptop, so I will need to get an adapter. According to a server fault post, I will need a usb-to-db9 adapter chained with a db9-to-rj45 adapter. Will I also need a null-modem cable to do this? In addition, I run linux on my laptop; will all usb-to-db9 adapters work on linux, or will I need to check to see if they explicitly support linux? I found this cord, but I'd prefer to get something from a more convenient store, and I don't think they sell that model. If anyone has done something similar to this before, I would appreciate any pointers you could give.

In my experience, most USB-serial cables use very similar controllers that popular Linux distros' kernels happily recognize out-of-the-box, so I wouldn't worry too much about getting any particular model. It's not clear to me from the documentation if a null modem cable would be required, but I'm inclined to think not.

Provided they correctly declare as CDC devices, there's no need for a more specific driver. Windows is the failure in this instance, since it lacks much sense of what a device class driver even is.