>We have the fancy $1000 model "at the office" It is an Avocent
>(Cybex) product that connects 8 PCs on one side of the switch with two
>sets of display/keyboard/mice on the other side. One "terminal"
>(display, keyboard, mouse) is in the equipment rack with the KVM
>switch and all the attached PCs. The other "terminal" is remote via
>CAT5 cable!!! The KVM switch actually sends the analog RGB signals
>over 3 of the twisted pairs in a CAT5 with the 4th pair used for the
>PS2 (keyboard/mouse) signaling. Switching between connected computers
>is done with the keyboard. A magic key sequence (something like
>pressing "print screen" twice) brings up an on screen video overlay
>with a list of machine names to choose from.
The next step up from this are the ones that digitize the video, compress
it, and stream it over the network. You can work a whole room full of
computers from literally anywhere in the world without installing any
"remote control" software on them because it's all done over TCP/IP. In
fact, you can watch anything that has a VGA output on it.
Needless to say this is even more expensive, but the geek factor is enormous...
>I know a few "computer knowledgeable" guys who recommend Linksys
>products for budget computer networks but acknowledge that Linksys is
>something like the best of the worst. I'm sure products like the KVM,
>Ethernet hubs, etc work fine. However when there is a significant
>amount of software (firmware) involved (in products like the Linksys
>Cable/DSL routers) that is where you sometimes run into problems.
>Weird stuff like Internet access gets slower and slower and eventually
>stops. If impatient, just press the secret reset button on the
>Linksys router. Or, if you like, just wait a few more minutes and the
>hardware watchdog will press the reset button for you ;)
Unfortunately it goes without saying that when routers and KVM's get down
to $29.95 this is bound to happen. Not long ago there was a story about
"When Routers Attack". It seems that one of the manufacturers (forget who)
had coded the router to check a certain time server to set its own internal
clock. The only problems with this scheme were that they hard-coded the
address of a single, specific time server instead of picking from a list of
them at random or some similar scheme, AND they had it make the attempt at
rather frequent intervals (you might say VERY frequent intervals). You can
guess what happened--it brought some university's time server down with
what amounted to a DDoS attack. All those thousands of routers kept pinging
that server for months before the admins figured it out (the waste of
bandwidth alone was a considerable expense for them). A firmware upgrade
would fix the problem but who bothers to register ownership of a cheap
router so the manufacturer can tell everyone to upgrade their firmware?
Firmware upgrade, what's that? What's this file attached to this email?
Think I'll just open it and see...
--
Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"