Subject: Re: Looking for KVM recommendations
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Aug 17 2001 - 14:17:49 MDT
At 11:10 AM -0700 8/17/01, Pete Peters wrote:
>Picked up a couple of Dell 4100's for W2K Servers for a home network.
><the crowd hisses and boos> I also have my Macs. <Loud cheering from
>crowd> What I don't have is space for multiple monitors, keyboard, etc,
>so I need to purchase a KVM. Appears the major brands are Cybex and
>Belkin, then a host of others.
>
>As one of the Macs is running YDL, and there might be an old Pentium
>running SlackWare, I would like to solicit comments from you wonderful
>folks out there who are using KVM's, especially in multi-OS environments
>(Linux, MacOS, Windoze), before I purchase one.
I've had very good luck with IOGear's MiniView USB. If the PCs are
USB and the Macs are USB it works quite well (and is a heck of a lot
cheaper than the style of KVM which lets Macs talk to PS/2 keyboards
and mice etc.).
The old 4-port model of the MiniView USB is "dumb". That is, it
cannot intercept keystrokes to use as a trigger to switch. Also, it
works by doing the equivalent of pulling the USB cord from one
computer and plugging it into another. They have a newer 4-port
model (which is more expensive than the old) that maintains virtual
USB keyboards and mice for each computer instead. It's supposed to
be faster when switching as a result. (on the old model I have, you
have to wait for the host OS to go through its USB hot plug event
handling before you get control -- not a long delay but it's not
instantaneous either.)
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Fri Aug 17 2001 - 13:26:28 MDT