[PLUG] video TO and keyboard/mouse FROM a laptop

[Rogan Creswick]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Roderick A. Anderson <raanders at acm.org> wrote:
> That make any sense?  Turn a laptop into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse
> for another system.

VNC (or NX) should do the trick--*if* you only need to work on working
systems ;).  Just run a vnc server on each machine you want to connect
to, and use a client on the laptop.  You can probably toss something
into /etc/hosts.deny on each machine to prevent anything other than
your laptop from connecting via vnc.

If you don't want to monkey with cables to get BIOS / etc. then you
could *probably* set up a serial console and interface with that from
the laptop as well, but that is bound to be at least a bit of work
(depending on the capabilities of the machines you need to work on).

Aside from serial, I don't know of any way to work on a broken machine
w/out a set of devices connected to it directly or via kvm.

--Rogan