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

Daniel Johnson teknotus at gmail.com
Wed Sep 3 17:55:38 UTC 2008


> Is there any kind of an adapter to let me use a laptop as the video,
> keyboard and mouse for another computer.  I've seen mention of network
> based KVM switches but would only need/want to connect to one system at
> a time.

I want to second the person who mentioned IPMI.  I can't recommend
this strongly enough.

Most recent servers have at least IPMI 1.5, and almost any new one
will have the 2.0 spec.

At my last job we setup IPMI to give us serial over Lan and got it
working with the bios screen.  So it was like being able to ssh to the
console.  IPMI also lets you do things like turn the power off, and
on.  We setup a PXE server in the colo box.  With the combination of
IPMI, serial over lan, and PXE boot images we could fix almost
anything that wasn't a hardware issue without traveling to the colo.
It was a bit of a learning curve, but well worth it.



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