Comet open source remote KVM from GL-iNet | Hacker News Reader

Comet open source remote KVM from GL-iNet

gl-inet.com

101 pointsnoja56 comments

Has anyone been able to find the open source part?

Is the software open source? The hardware? I’m not seeing anything other than a claim that it’s open source.

The product isn’t released yet. I would hazard a guess that the source will come after the device is officially available

GP isn't asking for the source files now, they are asking what parts of the product are going to be open source. The only thing the pre-launch advertisement page says is "open source" and this company has had troubles with how open different software components of the firmware actually ended up being so it's a fair question to want to know what the advertisement is actually claiming before getting interested in it.

https://github.com/gl-inet I don't see anything under "comet" or "kvm" but this is the place to watch I suppose.

This has been debated about glinet stuff in the past. I don’t think everything gets open sourced but it has open source code for parts of it

That’s my thought too. A person cannot build any of the firmware for their routers. It’s all based on openwrt though.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to flash these with openwrt.

I miss the power control.

I really want my home gaming machine to be an on-demand remote streaming system.

I don't expect to use this for that, I think Sunshine & Moonlight are probably going to give better results. But, I do need a way to turn my system on and off.

Alas, try as I might (I just tried again last night for a couple hours), my Gigabyte board refuses to suspend. It just wakes up immediately. There's a whole ass section of the AechWiki for Gigabyte boards being trouble, alas... Never ever again! https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Wakeup_tri...

So I kind of need a remote kvm, but one that can also trigger power on on my computer.

Wake on LAN has existed for decades, and works just fine for that if you’ve got an always on machine somewhere on your network. I have Home Assistant set up so that I can hit a button on my phone and it’ll wake my PC from wherever I am and let me connect via Parsec. Once I’m in powering off is fine because I can just tell Windows to shut down.

If you are running Windows try holding shift when you click the shutdown menu item, it’ll force it to do a full power down rather than suspending.

Has existed on decades, just requires the simple process of turning it on in your BIOS, then changing your network adapter advanced settings in Windows to Wake on Magic Packet, and configure the power management settings to "allow this device to wake the computer", etc... It's like a 20 step process.

That’s three steps

AFAIK you can't send wol packets between subnets, or over wireguard, without either reconfiguring your router firewall or setting up an proxy service on Lan what you can poke to actually send the wol request.

You need an always-on machine, and a wired network connection since this rarely works over wifi. This excludes a lot of setups.

Wake on LAN requires working suspend, I believe. That's not working, because alas many desktops and workstations don't suspend well these days.

Wake on LAN is my ideal yes & would be perfect for this application. If only suspend werent broken. It's fantastically easy to setup in systems-networkd, a one line WakeOnLan=magic in your .link file. Easy as that for my laptop! https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wake-on-LAN#systemd.link

Depends on the board, I've had many mobos which power on when they receive WoL.

Check your bios settings.

Also, you can probably just strap a wifi-capable relay to power pins on your motherboard.

> Also, you can probably just strap a wifi-capable relay to power pins on your motherboard.

That's a lot more work than just buying a different KVM that already exposes its spare GPIO pins for exactly that purpose. There are plenty of options that come bundled with the necessary cables and adapters to connect the KVM to the motherboard headers while leaving the existing power/reset buttons usable.

Wake on LAN should work from S5 (off), as long as you leave the power supply switched on; but the EU ErP very low standby power setting usually needs to be off.

Would you happen to haven any write-up on how you configured such a setup? Or some links to posts you found useful to set this up?

There's not much to it to be honest. If you've got Home Assistant running then https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wake_on_lan/ will sort you out, and I have Parsec (https://parsec.app) installed on my desktop so that it starts on boot.

Thank you for the pointers! I'll start from there.

I just recently converted my gaming PC to a game streaming system. I considered getting a PiKVM for power/resolving issues remotely but I ended up going with Wake-on-LAN. Though setting it up was a hassle.

If you just need power control and your motherboard supports it, I've seen that some people use smart plugs and enable a setting in their BIOS that turns on the computer whenever it detects power.

Ha! I stumbled upon this by mistake. I wanted the camera to be able to turn on the PC to store recordings, but while tweaking the BIOS settings, I somehow got that wrong, and instead the PC turns on whenever it detects power.

I have it connected to an Eve Energy so I can track power usage, and that turned into a good remote way to turn it on.

Then with a Tailscale, I remote into it easily.

The downside is that I can't shut it down remotely without knowing when exactly to also turn off the plug. I could create some automation, but it takes about 2 seconds being off before turning on again.

>The downside is that I can't shut it down remotely without knowing when exactly to also turn off the plug. I could create some automation, but it takes about 2 seconds being off before turning on again.

Huh, I would have expected the BIOS to not do that if it detected a graceful shutdown (or at least have a longer grace period).

Use a WiFi smart plug. None of the WoL headaches, and can be used from anywhere.

It can be a little more refined than that. This is cheap and replaces the wired PWR/RST buttons: https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/expansion-car...

Probably could use those opto isolated Shelly relays and they run their own web server you can manage the state from

I go for whole power strips now: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tp-link+smart+power+strip&crid=JA...

Use a smart socket and set your bios to always turn on when power is on

Why not a device that can turn your computer on and off, and let sunshine + moonlight do what they do (and likely do better and absolutely be much cheaper than hardware capture)? There are a tons options for something like this at every price level, here is a random one based on an archpopular ESP microcontroller: https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/expansion-car...

Honestly this is why I just buy Supermicro workstation boards with BMCs for everything. No need to mess with third party stuff or guess if the vendor's WoL is going to work right (or deal with the possibility you need to hard restart the computer). Everything is just cooked in from the start.

Their boards kind of suck. Poor quality control and poor support. I switched to Asrock Rack and never looked back.

Both nanokvm and jetkvm have modules that emulate the power button press modules!!

would like to add pikvm in there as well.

> but one that can also trigger power on on my computer.

Wake on LAN is nice, when it works. For everything else, there's ~ $10 modules you can by from Ali Express. They are essentially a small WiFi radio and a digital switch. You wire it in-line with the power/reset switch on your PC case.

They're very simple devices so either Tasmota or ESPHome or DIY from scratch isn't that difficult.

I have a few PCs in my rack and I can monitor the power LED status and press the power/reset buttons remotely. I used Home Assistant to integrate them with my KVM so just switching to a different bank of ports on the KVM will wake up the matching PC.

do you have a link

Here's one:

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005287125116.html

There are different kinds of options in the related products section.

Do yourself a favor and make sure it's preflashed with ESPHome, eg https://a.co/d/8wh4oEK

Not immediately handy, but the two devices that I used are from a few years ago. Maybe these model numbers have been deprecated for newer hardware.

Sinilink PCle Computer Remote (XY-WPCE)

Sinilink USB Computer Remote (XY-WPCL)

If you have the space and a spare PCI Express slot, I suggest going that route just for the slightly tighter integration; if memory serves, there is a always active 3.3 volt supply as well as a way to infer if the PC is awake or not. You still need jumper wires off to the front panel header though for power and reset purposes.

It doesn't look like this is available just yet. I can't wait to see more details when it comes out.

I have a JetKVM (https://jetkvm.com/) and it's been absolutely fantastic. I'm still waiting on the ATX expansion board, but the core unit is used to monitor my homeserver.

Can a single JetKVM control multiple computers? I have several AI training machines that occasionally got stuck and need a power cycle. Most of the time this happened when I’m out of town so it has been annoying.

It can only control one set of monitor/hid but through the extension port you could wire up something for multiple computers power buttons (the ATX module mentioned by GP uses a rp2040, which has plenty of GPIOs).

I think it would be simpler to buy a network PDU (or iot plugs) for your use case, assuming the computers can be set to power-on automatically.

These look great, but if you missed the Kickstarter boat and you're only just finding out about them today; how do you buy one?

Wait. My theory was that they were so popular making a solution like this, that they were overwhelmed with orders. Kinda like how Framework have a 3-6 month wait from order to delivery.

I'm guessing they're getting through the kickstarter batch and then they're going to launch a store, particularly once they get all the bugs worked out of the manufacturing process.

I kinda would like to see a DP over USB-C version so keyboard, mouse, video, and power all go over one cable.

I've have a need for a kvm for a customer I'm working with because they're too cheap to buy an enterprise-y one, so I ordered a couple JetKVM's to use and test, but I've been waiting a month so far, and not really sure when I'll get them. The joy of kickstarters...

I looked at the nanokvm's, but there's some serious issues with power feedback in the v1 design they're selling still that causes devices not to boot, so that seemed a non-starter, though I really like sispeed's pci card concept too - may still getting one of these. Not yet stocked in the US anywhere yet either I found.

I jumped on this as at least I know of GL-iNet that I can buy them usually and expect a product to ship, albeit slow boat from China. Sadly not shipping yet, but here's hope it's something they'll stock in an Amazon warehouse eventually.

As for the nanoKVM power design, I agree it's a pain. Not sure what's the state of things on the forums now, but in my experience, the issue comes from the device trying to draw power via the USB HID port instead of the dedicated PD. In my case it helped enabling power sharing on that USB. That prevents the host cutting power there and the KVM stays on when the PC restarts

How similar is this to the sipeed NanoKVM? (RISC-V based, software source https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM ) From the outside it looks very very alike.

I think everything coming out now is (essentially) coming down to the same core chips -- an HDMI-to-USB capture device + WCH's various UART-to-HID products being hubbed together. Just pick your SoC and software to run the show on top.

https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH9329.html

There's also the class of devices that includes PiKVM, where it's HDMI-to-MIPI for the video capture, and everything else is standard Raspberry Pi capabilities (Ethernet, WiFi, USB host and device, GPIO for motherboard power/reset/LED).

This sounds like the kind of dream KVM hardware I've been searching out for 20 years but isn't a quad core 1.6ghz CPU a little excessive to forward USB and HDMI signals?

The security implications of trusting some random Linux distro produced by anyone, to put unfettered access to your stuff on the Internet seems iffy.

Also this doesn't actually seem to be a kvm because it requires a separate cpu to access the video and USB. It seems to me more like a vnc / remote desktop kind of thing. Is there something I'm missing?

I'm very curious to see if they went with vanilla Lennox for this or if they're going to repurpose the openwrt system that they know so well.

Also, I'm calling it right now, shortly after this launches there will be some pretty tight integration with some of their other networking gear. Something like a plug and play off the shelf remote out of band management solution

LOL, I googled Lennox then realized it was an autocorrect typo of Linux

Lennox is terrible and won't even give you the service manual unless you have a government HVAC cert number.

> LOL, I googled Lennox then realized it was an autocorrect typo of Linux

Good catch! Too bad I didn't catch it before comment edit timer expired.

Yes, that _should_ have read "linux" and not the HVAC mfgr :).

Are things like this and NanoKVM basically the same as TinyPilot, which I've seen discussed on HN?

Yes, they all are KVM over IP solutions. They just differ in software, SoCs / board design and price points

It doesn't look like the source or the product are available yet?

It's too bad that it does not include VGA by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com