Re: [SAGE] DTE: PCMCIA card which emulates a monitor?

[Ted Nolan <Ted.Nolan@sri.com>]

Hello folks,

You may recall that some months ago, I was looking for what amounted to,
though I couldn't think to frame it this way, a virtual 1 seat KVM switch 
that could be run from a laptop.

That is, I wanted a PCMCIA card with a VGA/ps2 keyboard/ps2 mouse pigtail
with an application on the laptop to drive it for connecting out to
headless machines.

That particular card seemed not to exist, but I did get some pointers
to a possible alternate, the KVM2USB box from Epiphan :

 www.epiphan.com/products/product.php?pid=27&gclid=CLPWlej7u4oCFQImUAodVUsXPg

It was a bit pricier than what I had in mind, but I decided I would get one
and check it out.  I finally had the occasion to use it recently, and
I'm afraid I have to say I'm not too impressed.

What you get is a box with a CD, the actuall KVM2USB box, a USB cable
and the VGA/kbd/mouse pigtail.

The KVM2USB box is about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and is entirely
powered through the USB connection.  It seemes reasonably well made and
robust (the case is metal).  It may in fact be a fine piece of equipment.

The software, unfortunately, is otherwise.  First, the CD that comes with
the device is stamped as a driver CD, but when you put it in the drive,
all it does is start an IE session to the Ephiphan web site, from where
you are expected to download the real drivers.  I don't per se have any
problem with a company saying up-front, go to our site to make sure you
have the latest stuff, but you shouldn't label that as a driver CD.  In
this case, I had taken out my WI-FI card to put in a USB2 card to hitch
the KVM2USB to, so .. no Internet.  I don't want to overstate the difficulty:
I was at home, not in the only server closet in Burkina Faso or anything
like that, but it did irritate me.

Second, I had a lot of problems actually installing the drivers when I did
get them downloaded (Windows only, of course).  I don't know exactly what
was going on.  I finally changed my store brand USB2 card for an Adaptec
USB2 card and got it working, but I can't say for sure that actually had
anything to do with it (Win XP was happy enough with the store brand card
for everything else I've ever tried with it).  The driver installs as
a hidden device in Device Manager, the first time I've ever seen that..
Anyway, after several tries and unexpected re-occurances of "found new
hardware", and manual driver unloading, it finally settled down.

Third, the actual application is not good at all.  Once you get the
driver installed, you can start the console application and all appears
well:  a window opens with the boot screen of the PC you are hitched
to.  As various parts of the boot sequence clear the screen on the
subject PC, the application resises the window, and retunes its VGA
capture parameters.  That's annoying as it goes completely blank each
time it recalculates, but livable.

What is not livable is the KVM part of the application.  By default,
you are just an observer of the screen, but you can select a menu to
"Enter KVM Mode" at which point your mouse and keyboard are supposed to
be mapped through to the PC at the far end.  Unfortunately this doesn't
work well at all.  I can speak for the mouse support, as the remote PC
was a FreeBSD box, and I didn't need anything more than a text mode
console, but the keyboard emulation was miserable.  I suppose there may
be something strange about my laptop, which is an old (IBM era)
Thinkpad, but it seems vanilla enough.  I found that while some control
characters would go thorugh OK (like ^Z for suspend), ^C would not.
Also the application appeared to be trapping the ALT key and not
sending it through, and sending through the arrow keys worked only
intermittently.  Sometimes, like old versions of VNC, everything would
get into a wierd state and the keystrokes passed through seemed to have
nothing to do with what I was typing.  Randomly hitting shift, CTRL &
ALT would eventually get it back into a working state.  If you didn't
type anything for a while it would stop listening to you, and you would
have to reset the app to KVM mode (or in some cases, restart the whole
app).  Eventually I just gave up on it and got out another keyboard
(keeping the VGA capture as my monitor though).

Looking at the Epiphan manual, they are all about VGA capture, and KVM
is a couple of paragraphs of afterthought.  I also must say, in fairness,
that I never attempted to contact their tech support.  Perhaps they could
have resolved all my problems straight-away.  I felt it more likely however,
that this would probably take far longer than just getting out a keyboard.

Anyway, that's how that turned out.

				Ted