The beautiful world of KVM switching.

[Shurikane]

Attempt #1: They don't have any in stock. Told to come back a few days later.
Attempt #2: Find a good 4-port KVM switch for 20 bucks (Canadian!) with a real switch on it and PS/2 plugs.
Attempt #3: Silly me had only bought one set of cables. I needed another one for the other computer.
Attempt #4: Turns out I needed male-male cables instead of male-female. I bring my stuff back to the shop and exchange it. The male-male cables costed a few more pennies so the salesman "invented" a last-minute sale and made the total replacement cost zero. ~~~~~

And VOILA!

 

[Jung]

<3 for KVMs i was able to spend more money on 1 huge monitor rather than 2 decent sized monitors.

 

[BRiT]

Why not just use remote X-displays or remote desktop? Both are free and work nearly as well as KVMs.

 

[Jung]

speed & convenience. i use terminal services everyday of my life, it's slow and annoying. not to mention you can only have 1 consecutive login on xp and only with xp pro. i'd much rather use ssh than remote x also. i rather just click a button on my desk.

 

[Shurikane]

Ditto. With the poor amount of RAM I've got, I'd rather use stuff that doesn't take up my computer resources.

That, and one day, I shall paint that switch in some spiffy nonsensical color.

P.S.: Someone needs to add this :wacko:

smiley to the database.

 

[BRiT]

speed & convenience. i use terminal services everyday of my life, it's slow and annoying. not to mention you can only have 1 consecutive login on xp and only with xp pro. i'd much rather use ssh than remote x also. i rather just click a button on my desk.

I haven't noticed any slowness at all with my term services, then again the machines are higher-end AMD boxes [2.2 - 2.6Ghz raw speed]. As for the concurrent login, how does a KVM solve that for Win-OS? And as for remote-x (over ssh tunnel of course) it's there for those times you need to use some GUI tools.

There are ways around that. That's one of the tweaks I always perform on my installs. Goggle it "sp2 concurrent sessions". A good thread on this is on WinBeta.org, with the installer here. Theres also some registry and policy entries you can change to have some enhanced control over it.

 

[BRiT]

Ditto. With the poor amount of RAM I've got, I'd rather use stuff that doesn't take up my computer resources.

Then why not run Linux and ssh / remote-x into it instead of running a Win-OS?

 

[Shurikane]

Because I've never used Linux before, and I'm currently not in the mood to spend hours figuring it out and configuring it. My Win2K works and is fully broken-in, so I don't want to fix it.

 

[MaxPower]

I once tried to play half-life over a VNC session. Not pretty.

Avocent makes some serious KVM.

 

[Jung]

I haven't noticed any slowness at all with my term services, then again the machines are higher-end AMD boxes [2.2 - 2.6Ghz raw speed].

we use strictly amd64's at work at home my gaming comp is an overclocked 2600 running at 2.3 with 1gb of low latency ddr400. it's the network side of term services that's slow. not that low ram/processor would matter, since the processing is done on the host computer. terminal services are uneccarily slow when you can just use a kvm. term services are very annoying over the internet.

As for the concurrent login, how does a KVM solve that for Win-OS?

it doesn't, the kvm just saves the time to it takes to log in, although trivial it's still annoying to have to remote in everytime i need to do something. clicking 1 switch is alot faster and convenient.

And as for remote-x (over ssh tunnel of course) it's there for those times you need to use some GUI tools.

at my house i may choose to use the gui, but at work there is nothing i would need to do that can't be accomplished faster in terminal. actually i don't run a gui on any of our linux/bsd servers. honestly i'd have to laugh at any admin that did. no point in using unecessary resourses for it to look pretty.

There are ways around that. That's one of the tweaks I always perform on my installs. Goggle it "sp2 concurrent sessions". A good thread on this is on WinBeta.org, with the installer here. Theres also some registry and policy entries you can change to have some enhanced control over it.

yeah i've done that to a few workstation at work, the point is it took 5 mintes to set up the kvm & while i'm completely comfortable editing the registry i didn't have to. all of my home pc's have monitors, so it's really a non issue. my slower comp has an older 17". i thought about upgrading, but chose to get a 23" & use a kvm. i understand your points, but it really comes down to personal prefrence.

 

[BRiT]

we use strictly amd64's at work at home my gaming comp is an overclocked 2600 running at 2.3 with 1gb of low latency ddr400. it's the network side of term services that's slow. not that low ram/processor would matter, since the processing is done on the host computer. terminal services are uneccarily slow when you can just use a kvm. term services are very annoying over the internet.

The one's I've seen, that would be usable where Term-Services is annoyingly slow over the internet, wouldn't be any quicker and would cost an arm and a leg. Have you found any good deals on internet-based KVMs? Term services might be annoying, but it's usable when KVMs aren't.

yeah i've done that to a few workstation at work, the point is it took 5 mintes to set up the kvm & while i'm completely comfortable editing the registry i didn't have to. all of my home pc's have monitors, so it's really a non issue. my slower comp has an older 17". i thought about upgrading, but chose to get a 23" & use a kvm. i understand your points, but it really comes down to personal prefrence.

And it took me all of 15 seconds to run that Terminal Services tweak; unrar, drag-n-drop file 1 and double click file 2, and no physical labor involved.

 

[dustinzgirl]

you know shurikane, you really have a nice clean desk. mine looks like godzilla stomped through.

 

[MaxPower]

Avocent makes a really sweet KVM ove IP. You can reboot a machine from across the world and still have bios level access to it. http://www.avocent.com/web/en.nsf/Content/DSView

 

[Jung]

The one's I've seen, that would be usable where Term-Services is annoyingly slow over the internet, wouldn't be any quicker and would cost an arm and a leg. Have you found any good deals on internet-based KVMs? Term services might be annoying, but it's usable when KVMs aren't.

no that came out wrong. yeah the internet based kvm's are garbage. i'm not knocking term serv, i us it at work everyday i just rather not at home.

edit: when i ran the tweak at work i did it manually, lol i didn't know there was a script for it.

 

[TheGunslinger85]

I have a KVM, but it is a piece. It doesn't work well with XP at all. Then again, it was cheap. I guess I got what I paid for....

 

[MaxPower]

no that came out wrong. yeah the internet based kvm's are garbage. i'm not knocking term serv, i us it at work everyday i just rather not at home.

edit: when i ran the tweak at work i did it manually, lol i didn't know there was a script for it.

Which IPKVM's have you used?

 

[Jung]

in the military we used black box's because of a government contract. i'd have to google for the exact model since it's been a while. when i worked for shell we used raritan telereach's for a few remote platforms. i work for eds currently, i've only used 1 since and it was an older model avocent. personally i don't like ip kvm's but there are always situations where normal remote admin methods just don't give you the control you need.