| From: James Knott <[email protected]> | On 07/06/2015 09:10 AM, Kevin Cozens wrote: | > On 15-07-05 10:59 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote: | >> - apparently I really only use the KVM for booting; it would be | >> nice if PCs had been designed to be happy headless | > | > In older days (a few generations of PC ago) there used to be a BIOS | > setting where you could tell it to ignore keyboard errors.
| I have 4 computers here, one with a year old motherboard. 3 of them can | run headless and the other, an old Compaq, I just leave an old keyboard | plugged in, but still access it via KVM. Before I got a PC, I had Sun workstations. They were willing to talk via a serial port to a "console" (they could use a display and keyboard too). This let you do things like reboot when hung, watch all the exciting messages during booting, configure the machine, run hardware diagnostics, etc. I don't really want to lose those functions. On PCs, they seem to require a console (or some quite expensive "management" features). That's why I use a KVM (and grumble). I think that the expensive management functions use ethernet transport. For security, it ought to be separate from other networks. I have no experience with them. Unfortuately, I think that the protocols are proprietary and different for each brand of computer. KVMs are either expensive or deficient. Or both. - cheap ones only support VGA, a very obsolete standard - some cheap KVMs don't pass DDC info so the OS cannot determine characteristics of the monitor. This causes a variety of problems (some modern Linux distros won't work out of the box with this). - some better cheap KVMs pass DDC information, but only to the computer currently selected. This works badly after a power failure when each computer is rebooting at the same time. - there are issues (that I don't understand) about keyboard and mouse states carrying over on switching. - I have another KVM that is normally sold for ~$500 that does a lot right: support dual-link DVI, does pass DDC to all computers. I paid $100, so that was a great choice. Even so, it gets a bit confused by some mice. HDMI switches are quite cheap these days. That would handle the V part of KVM. Maybe the clutter of multiple keyboards and mice would be OK. HDMI includes an ethernet signal now. Someone should build a pair of dongles to ship K and M stuff over that channel. USB over ethernet is probably already a thing. --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
