Stochastic Ideations

I've got several machines on or under my desk at home: my FreeBSD server, a mac mini, and a laptop, but only one keyboard and monitor. No problem, just use a KVM, right? Well, I'm on my fourth (or is it fifth?) KVM switch and I'm still trying to find one that will do what I want.

The big problem is that I have a "media keyboard", which I actually use (at the moment, I'm using the Logitech Wave keyboard). There's a great Mac app called ControllerMate that lets me do arbitrary actions on USB devices, so for example I can control the lights in my office from the keyboard using an Insteon connection. But I digress.

Most KVM switches want to create a "virtual keyboard" so that they can (for example) make the keyboard appear to remain connected while you're switched to a different machine. They do the same with the video connection so that your computer doesn't think it's been beheaded when you switch to a different machine. Here's the problem: the media keys on the keyboard appear as a separate USB device (usually a mouse with a gazillion buttons) , but the KVM switches map them to an internal convention, thereby disabling many of the keys. I'm sure the manufacturers think they're doing me a favor, but they are wrong.

The best option I've found so far is the TRENDnet TK-407K, which has no such smarts at all. It's just a raw path -- no virtual keyboard, no virtual mouse, no virtual monitor. In other words, it just stays out of my way. Incidently, it's also probably the cheapest KVM switch I've found. Because there are minimal active electronics it can be pretty high res (I'm running 1920x1200; it claims to work up to 2048x1536).

But it isn't perfect. The main problem with it is that when you switch machines you have to wait for the selected machine to detect the "new" hardware. Fortunately this is pretty quick on MacOS and FreeBSD, and I don't have any Windows boxes any more (I use Parallels when I must). But what's worse is that sometimes the USB doesn't seem to sync up at all (the light just keeps flashing and the keyboard and mouse are dead). Usually I can fix this by switching to another KVM port and then back again, or by unplugging the USB port from the host and plugging it back in again (easy for the laptop, hard for everything else). Sometimes I have to do this several times. I have no solution for this, and it really gets in the way of getting work done.

One other minor glitch: two ports come out the back, plus one on each side, and the keyboard and monitor connectors are on the front. The buttons are on top; there are no keyboard escapes, so you need convenient access to the unit. It's small out of the box (about 17x7x3 cm), but then you have to plug in the (proprietary, but not usuriously expensive) cables. Once you account for the bend radius in the cables, plan on dedicating about 40x30x3 cm on your (physical) desktop to the KVM. Why couldn't the cables have just come out the back?

I would have stuck with my old Raritan SwitchMan SW4-USB if it had just treated the media portion of the keyboard as a separate device that shouldn't be mapped. The Raritan was really a good KVM switch in every other respect, with a separately switched USB hub so I could have my printer connected to one machine while the keyboard and mouse were on another. Ah well.