Hacker News Reader

Comment by numpad0 | Hacker News Reader

KVMs are for rebooting and recovering servers without needing physical access. Maybe you would have some chance with HDMI splitter connected with an EDID dummy plug and an HDMI-Ethernet capture encoder thing, and some dedicated KVM for just keyboard and mouse, but idk.

View on HN

For me, I want to access my physical desktop without having to keep a physically separate monitor and keyboard than my MacBook. I have the physically separate monitor and keyboard, and I actually kept it co-located with my laptop for the longest time, but it's just more convenient to not have to swap it out with the laptop to maintain good posture, etc. (I use the laptop in bed due to chronic pain/disability)

Honestly, this whole KVM thread is a bit confusing to me. I've always equated KVM with keyboard/video/mouse switches: enabling multiple computers to be controlled by the same I/O devices. Nowadays I just use a multi-source monitor and USB switch for that (can even automatically control the monitor via DCC, depending on the switch state, look it up on HN).

And I usually refer to the "IP KVMs" as a "lights-out" module/engine as I was familiar with HP's "ilo (integrated lights out) [0]. More on lights out management on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band_management

I was thinking of making my own with an ESP32 + serial, as that's enough in theory, though I am unsure how well-supported serial ports are in BIOS and bootloader. Also, IIRC RS232 is ±12V, so the ESP would need a level shifter.

TFA's device looks cheap enough (well, depending on shipping to EU), I may just get one. The screen is a bit superfluous though, and I think that the ATX power button support is a must.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPE_Integrated_Lights-Out

The whole situation around low-end server KVMs are a bit unfortunate IMO. BIOS can theoretically work with UART just fine, and not even full VGA@24bpp should be an absolute necessity for just confirming BSoD to decide to power cycle the machine, so it should be theoretically possible to be cheapened out a lot more to be e.g. telnet only or up to 5fps QVGA through HDMI-Composite adapter, or it could even be like a servo pointing an antenna to switch between different dummy load terminated VGA cables relying on TEMPEST techniques to get frames, for more potential cost and reliability gains.

I expected that kind of potato IP-KVMs to surface from crypto mining space, but alas, what we got was this thing which predecessor have reputation of crashing. That might not be stupid, but a bit frustrating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com