ATEN kvm switches...

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Quoting admin at kclinux.net:

> Somewhere there is a warehouse that Sprint owns that has a bunch of the
> MasterView series.  The KVM's are great but they fluke out when you reboot
> HP or Dell servers and the KVM isnt switched onto the server.  For
> instance,
> if your KVM is on port 1, and your controlling and viewing a server, and
> someone reboots the server that is on the KVM port 3, after it boots up,
> and
> then you switch to port 3, the mouse would jump all over the place, and/or
> the keyboard wouldnt respond.   I think they use ones from BlackBox now.  I
> havent seen the KVM's being sold on sprindbid.com yet, but I wouldnt doubt
> it will be on there sooner or later.

There are several kinds of switches, but the ones you're talking about are 
simply that - switches.  The more advanced kind have the ability to emulate the 
presence of a Keyboard, Video(Monitor), and Mouse for the channels that are not 
active.  That way, if the system reboots, or for some other reason (GVM) looks 
for one of these components while the KVM is switched to a different system, 
everything's cool.

It seems that within this class of device there are various levels of success.  
I think some of them actually query the live console (K,V & M) and return the 
response of the hardware that's actually present, so you can use things lile 
scroll-mice and multi-button thingies, whereas others simply return <mouse 
present>.

Yeah, on my ancient Belkin switch, if the NT box reboots I have no mouse, and 
it can take switching in and out a couple of times to get it to recognise the 
buttons correctly, but it works.

You can actually get a decent 4 port KVM for about $125 if you look carefully.  
You can spend $3K and get a real worthless POS too.

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