29 Oct
2008
29 Oct
'08
5:52 p.m.
--- On Wed, 10/29/08, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
All I can say is that I've never had much luck
with
Belkin KVMs on Suns
and SGIs, or even PCs in some cases, and tend to stick to
others that I
know are less picky. The best ones I found are cheap
Newlink ones. I
have one here working happily with a Sun, an SGI, a PC, an
Apple Mac, an
Acorn Archimedes, and a BBC micro (actually it's a
4-way KVM and the SGI
and Mac are not usually connected to it), without a PS/2
keyboard in
sight. Sadly they don't make that model any more :-(
I haven't had that good of luck with the "electronic" KVM's either. They
tend to attempt to do too much thinking and not enough doing what they're told. Many
only work properly with PC's, and even then, I've seen some screw up when running
at really high resolutions - they just blank out the video, even though the monitor and
the computer can handle it just fine without the KVM in the way. Also, many really want
there to be a keyboard connected, and often times I only really want to switch the video.
I guess the device I need is really just a "V", in that case...
Some also don't like the really old IBM 84 key AT keyboard I use.
The old mechanical switch KVM's are great for these odd situations. Although some of
the cheap ones aren't that well sheilded and introduce ringing in the video at high
resolution.
The best KVM I have found has been the Hewlett Packard J1484A. I found it in a pile of
junk PC's at the scrapper. It has worked flawlessly with whatever I throw at it.
It's an electronic design, but the people that made this one got it right. It's
powered by... get this... a power cord! Wonder of wonders, it contains it's _own_
power supply! No external brick! It has a button for each channel, not just one to
"cycle". When you press a button, it changes to that channel - wether there is
anything there or not. The indicator flashes to let you know that it doesn't see
anything, but it passes video and I/O through just the same.
-Ian