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

[Joseph Noonan <joseph.noonan@rigaku.com>]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 at 11:48pm Ted Nolan wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes, and I read the thread with a lot of interest (hope?), because I've 
looked at my notebook on a table or floor in a server room and thought: 
"I've got a 15" flat panel, a keyboard and a mouse, but lets go get a 
monitor and keyboard to plug into headless over there".  I wish 
notebooks at least had a connector that would let you use the built in 
display as a standalone monitor -- but I guess that's not going to 
happen. Sigh.


> 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.

I bought the overpriced POS[1] myself and have had exactly zero success 
with it.  I've tried that crappy software with 3 different notebooks 
(Dell D610, d620, D520), and with several (Dell) servers varying in age 
from 5 years to 3 mos ago, an old DEC/Compaq Alpha, a couple of misc. 
whitebox PC's and even another notebook I was configuring but didn't 
want on my desk.  Work with none of them well enough to do a bare metal 
install.


> 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.

Agreed -- it really seems to be nicely built.


> 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.

I had exactly the same reaction. "That is NOT a driver disk".


> 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.

I didn't have this kind of trouble with the drivers, but I was using the 
built in USB ports on the recent-ish Dells mentioned above, not an addon 
card, so maybe that was it.

> Third, the actual application is not good at all.

Correction: it is a complete piece of crap.  I have NEVER been able to 
successfully interrupt a server while it was booting using that app.  Not 
once.

> 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.

Agreed.


> 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).

You have very accurately summarized my experience.  I can't figure out 
what kind of system the developers ever tested this against as it has 
been 100% useless for doing any kind of bare metal loading of servers.


> 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.

Exactly.  I gave this thing one more try on a trip to a remote office 
just a couple of weeks ago and ended up stealing a KVM port from 
another server because I really did need to get the server installed 
before leaving later that day.

On another note, I recently discovered this:

 	<http://www.kvm-switches-online.com/0su70028.html>

and I'm going to try one of these.  I figure I can use an extra cardbus 
10/100 that I carry with me anyway and a crossover cable and get the 
desired effect.  We'll see.



thx,

-j


[1] Doesn't mean "point of sale"


-- 

Joseph F. Noonan
Rigaku Americas Corporation
joseph.noonan@rigaku.com
(desk) +1-281-362-2332
(fax)  +1-281-364-3636


"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, 
and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett