Why Do KVM's Cost So Much, and Other Strange Computer Questions!

[Jon Westfall]

I consider myself a pretty geeky guy. I know a lot about computers, yet have some questions I've always wondered about. Since its Sunday morning, and some of us are probably procrastinating our "honey-do" lists or our own weekend projects, I figured I'd throw out a few questions that have always baffled me, and see if anyone has a good answer!<br /><br />1. Ok, anyone who has ever priced KVM's (Keyboard-Video-Mouse switches) knows that these things can cost a bunch of money, and the cabling can outcost the unit at times (For example, a company I do work with purchased an 8-port KVM (2 terminal capable) for $199, and then purchased 8 sets of cables for $30 each). But why? A KVM is a pretty simple thing, and while I'm not electrical engineer, I really can't fathom it takes too much programming or circuitry to switch my I/O from one set of ports to another...<br /><br />2. About a year ago, I began working with a web hosting business as their technical manager. Its a small company, so I'm usually called in for either really big problems, or to work on the Red Hat linux box (As the other tech. really doesn't know Linux that well). Upon "inheriting' this Red Hat 7.3 box, I quickly found that someone had removed the "shutdown" and "reboot" commands, forcing me to go old-school and use Init to accomplish these tasks. Can anyone offer me a good reason why they'd ever remove these commands from a box that only an administrator would ever have shell access to?<br /><br />3. In Windows 3.1, we had a program called "Recorder" (Anyone remember it?) that allowed you to record macros. Anyone know why Microsoft removed it from Windows 95 and up? Was I the only person who used it ;)<br /><br />So there are my 3 twisted strange questions - feel free to answer mine or post your own. Perhaps we can unravel the mysteries of the computing universe. :D

[Anthony Caruana]

1. Ok, anyone who has ever priced KVM's (Keyboard-Video-Mouse switches) knows that these things can cost a bunch of money, and the cabling can outcost the unit at times (For example, a company I do work with purchased an 8-port KVM (2 terminal capable) for $199, and then purchased 8 sets of cables for $30 each). But why? A KVM is a pretty simple thing, and while I'm not electrical engineer, I really can't fathom it takes too much programming or circuitry to switch my I/O from one set of ports to another...
post your own. Perhaps we can unravel the mysteries of the computing universe. :D

I'm with you. I don't get why the KVMs we buy at work cost a fortune when the unit I bought for home cost $40 AUD including cables. Sure, it's just a 2 port unit but the software in thse devices is very mature, the hardware is relatively simple and the cables, to my understanding, anything more special than extension leads. Perhaps I'm understating the complexity.

As for the other questions, it's late in my part of the world and I can't think of a reason. Perhpas it's just the way things are.

Good night

[Larry L]

Jon Westfall

I can not even imagine a more off topic post.

The worst part was, I read the whole thing. Trying to find the lead in.

No FLAMES please. I just hope this is not the begining of hundreds of off topic posts.

I come to this site twice a day to find out what is going on in Pocket PC land.

I own a 3150, 3650, 3670, 2215, x50v and throw in 2 palms.

I have just purchased a KVM switch, and agree, the prices are crazy.

Larry L

[lapchinj]

No FLAMES please. I just hope this is not the begining of hundreds of off topic posts.

I come to this site twice a day to find out what is going on in Pocket PC land.
Everyone needs a little off-topic to loosen up a little. If there were never any off-topic posts it would be like sitting in class all day without a break :wink:
Stick around you'll get to like all the topics. You might even start coming more often :mrgreen:

I agree with all so far about the KVM's. Probably someone is making good money on them. Probably the same reason cell phones cost $200 if you go to by it and the company will give you five all for $19.95 :?

Recorder??? I thought MS killed it because I was the only one using it. They probably just put it back into Word.

Jeff-

[gorkon280]

AMEN! KVMs are priced outta this world. Even the ones that do not provide remote acess to the servers connected to them. Cables are pricey as hell to for what amounts to about 5 seconds of work by a machine!

[rabilancia]

...3. In Windows 3.1, we had a program called "Recorder" (Anyone remember it?) that allowed you to record macros. Anyone know why Microsoft removed it from Windows 95 and up? Was I the only person who used it ;)...
:D

I too used the recorder a lot on Windows 4WG 3.11 and took it with me when I moved to Windows 95 by simply copying the file (recorder.exe) over. I'm not sure why I stopped using it, but there are many times I'd like to use an OS-level macro tool. I know 3rd party products are available, but....

[Jon Westfall]

Jon Westfall

I can not even imagine a more off topic post.

The worst part was, I read the whole thing. Trying to find the lead in.

No FLAMES please. I just hope this is not the begining of hundreds of off topic posts.

I come to this site twice a day to find out what is going on in Pocket PC land.

I own a 3150, 3650, 3670, 2215, x50v and throw in 2 palms.

I have just purchased a KVM switch, and agree, the prices are crazy.

Larry L

Point taken. However, as as been mentioned, reading a site totally focused exclusively on one thing would get highly boring after awhile. Add in the fact that on Sundays, relatively little is going on in Pocket PC land news-wise, and you get the reason for Off-Topic posts in the first place.


As a side note on the whole KVM thing: I found a 4-port on Ebay with cables for $14.99 from a respected seller who had a bunch of them. As he puts on his listing "The retail price for this is $199"... Somewhere some KVM developer is laughing at us...

[carphead]

Larry,

The thing that makes this site such a great place is that it's 90% Pocket PC. On a slack day for front page postings why not add a few off-topic stuff.

I like and miss this sort of post. Its needed to stop a forum becoming to focused on one subject.

BTW I think the costs of KVM's come from due to cost of employing the elves inside them.

[obvious]

I used to use Recorder as well and have recently been looking for a suitable alternative. I wonder if the original recorder.exe would work under XP?

[C Sammet]

I couldn't agree more about the KVM pricing. In our server room we have an 8x2 KVM that was purchased on sale for $150. The cables for it at the time were $50 a piece. Needless to say, to save money we only bought the cables we needed at the time. The cables have dropped to $38 each if you can find them, which seems to be another painful part of the KVM cost conspiracy. They obsolete different models at different times and the cables can't always be used on the newer models.

Another over-priced item I would like to throw in the topic is UPS'. Aren't they some inexpensive switch and a battery. Why do these things cost an arm and a leg. They have started to come down, but those price decreases are for the low end models mostly.

[waanz]

The recorder has not disappeared, it's always been there.

Under Windows XP, it is called Sound Recorder and it shortcut is usually found under Accessories/Entertainement.

You can also access it directly at the following location:
%SystemRoot%\System32\sndrec32.exe

[waanz]

OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOD

I gotta apologize to all of you. I am extremely tired at this time of the day (end of the week-end in Europe) and read your message quickly.

I didnt realize you were speaking abt the macro recorder from Windows Workgroup.

Please do disgard my reply and bare with me for tonight.

/waanz

[Sven Johannsen]

I think the KVM thing is mostly a matter of market. There is some significant engineering that goes into the box. Think about having four PCs and only one keyboard and mouse. Boot them all. Only one is going to come up with K/M support. You generally cant then add a keyboard and/or mouse and have it work without rebooting, so you need keyboard and mouse emulation, on the ports that don't have a physical device attached to it.

You also have to ensure that you are not going to fry the PC output or the peripheral when electronically switching them in and out. Kind of like unhooking and hooking up monitors while everything is hot. I'm sure we all do it, but all manufacturers recommend against it for valid reasons.

High quality cable and quality parts are more expensive. I'm sure many of us have come across a cheap video cable that just doesn't hack the higher frequencies or cause interference on some other device.

Some of the original KVMs I had used three cables for each PC. Seperate keybard, mouse and video extender cables that you could get anywhere. The recent ones are a single cable and connector at the KVM end and an triple breakout at the PC end. Much more convinient and compact, but a unigue item with limited market.

Finally it comes down to how many of these things are sold. You can get two port KVMs for dirt cheap with cables, because there is a much greater market for these than for 8 port rack mount units. The buyers for the 8 port ones are also typically IT departments with a bigger budget (or they wouldn't have eight servers), allowing the KVM manufacturers to use better componenets, add more features, provide a better warranty and still sell the items.

Just MHO

[Christian]

I used Recorder extensively all the way until 98SE, at which point I think I lost the floppy it was on :lol:

I've always wondered if the functionality didn't exist in some other MS program? Is it somehow part of Office now? OS-level macros were really useful.

[Zack Mahdavi]

KVMs are VERY expensive. I've been looking to buy a DVI KVM.. they sell for around $250. At that price, I can just buy another Dell 17" LCD! Oh, and that price doesn't include cables, which run for another $100 from the manufacturer (Belkin)... sheesh.

[JonMisurda]

I used to use Recorder as well and have recently been looking for a suitable alternative. I wonder if the original recorder.exe would work under XP?

http://www.rkeene.org/archive/dos/windows_3.1/windows/

If you download recorder.exe and recorder.dll, it seems to run, but i didn't try it out.

Jon

[Jon Westfall]

I used to use Recorder as well and have recently been looking for a suitable alternative. I wonder if the original recorder.exe would work under XP?

Iolo Technologies makes Macro Magic (http://www.iolo.com/mm/) which does everything, but I'm still leary to buy it at $40... I've found some discount coupons that supposedly are valid and give you 50% off, but they don't seem to work anymore. At $20, it would have been bought weeks ago.

As for Sven's reasoning with KVM's, I can see that they do have some fairly advanced logic in them, but it can't be all that complicated, at least I don't think I can. But I could be wrong.

Jon.

[Jon Westfall]

BTW I think the costs of KVM's come from due to cost of employing the elves inside them.

Ahh... Elves :mrgreen:

[altden2002]

Q: Why do they charge a lot for KVM?
A: Because they can.

Easy really, the only people who buy 8-port KVM are the people who have 8 computers, in corporate environment. If they have just spent $1000 per computer they will gladly spend another $240/8=$30 + $30(cable)==$60 per computer to avoid cost, space, power and support issues that come with 8 monitors and 8 keyboards.

[ricksfiona]

I have enough electronic engineering background to know that it doesn't cost much for an electric switching device to support multiple monitors, keyboards and mice. I don't think so.

Yes, this stuff is terribly overpriced.

[Sven Johannsen]

Q: Why do they charge a lot for KVM?
A: Because they can.

Easy really, the only people who buy 8-port KVM are the people who have 8 computers, in corporate environment. If they have just spent $1000 per computer they will gladly spend another $240/8=$30 + $30(cable)==$60 per computer to avoid cost, space, power and support issues that come with 8 monitors and 8 keyboards.

And 8 mice and 8 sets of speakers. The speaker support is just starting to happen, but it is usefull to get some audio prompts IMHO.

Check out Cyberguys if you are looking for KVMs. They have a 4 port DVI with cables for $137. Even have a Dual monitor, two port DVI with cables for $119 (got one of these), and lots of others.

[wesk]

Another over-priced item I would like to throw in the topic is UPS'. Aren't they some inexpensive switch and a battery. Why do these things cost an arm and a leg. They have started to come down, but those price decreases are for the low end models mostly.

A UPS consists of a battery charger, one or more batteries, and a DC to AC converter. A UPS works by charging the battery from the AC outlet. The battery voltage is feed into a DC to AC converter which changes the battery voltage into 120v AC. The outlets on a UPS are always running off of the battery voltage, so that way when your power goes out there's no interruption of power.
The battery or batteries are most of the cost of a UPS. The higher the VA rating of a UPS means a higher capacity battery or multiple batteries.

Wes

[KimVette]

I have enough electronic engineering background to know that it doesn't cost much for an electric switching device to support multiple monitors, keyboards and mice. I don't think so.

Yes, this stuff is terribly overpriced.

Really!

You mean, it is not worth $80-$100 for a KVM switch which will SEAMLESSLY switch between computers, never dropping the load on the PS/2 and VGA ports (providing "virtual" mouse, keyboard, and monitor loads) so the drivers don't die, and at the same time supporting hotkeys for switching between machines?

Also, on the higher-end units, the electronic switching and scanning from PC to PC isn't worth any money?

Sure, you can go with the cheap mechanical A/B switches, but some drivers will simply drop the keyboard and mouse when the load is relieved, plus the ports will not be protected against discharge (cheap caps aren't enough, especially when you're talking servers which require near-0 downtime).

If you are running computers you don't care about, and uptime is irrelevant, go the $20 mechanical KVM switch route.

[Craig Horlacher]

Sorry I got in on this late and didn't get to read all the postings but I couldn't keep myself from giving my 2 cents.

KVM's are apparently hard to get right. I've worked with many at the four different companies I've been at in the last 10 years. At every place I've seen cheap kvm's cause problems. Fork out the cash for a good one. If you don't, you can expect problems. This is especially important if you have Sun hardware (possibly only older Sun hardware now?). If those Sun boxes loose the keyboard the only way to get it back is a reboot....in fact the machine may hang. Some of the cables are expensive because, besides the fact that they are proprietary, they have logic or wiring, or something to emulate the keyboard and mouse. This lets you reconfigure the kvm port configuration without the machines sencing io device loss. Even the most expensive kvms aren't perfect, requiring power cycles here and there, but they at least emulate the keyboard and mouse well enough that your servers won't have problems when they do power cycle.

I like linux. I've worked more with solaris. I don't know enough to really comment well on this. I don't know why you're rename those unless it was an easy way to avoid a well known shutdown/reboot exploit at some point in time. I guess that's possible.

I used Recorder back in the day. That was a very easy to use tool. I have no idea what happened to it. I also used the Object Packager if anyone remembers that. It also came with Windows 3.1 and whenever I came up with it as a solution nobody knew what I was talking about. It was more useful I guess when Object Linking and Embedding was so young and all the power of copy and paste that we have today wasn't so automatic.

As far as the complaint af the beginning of the thread about this being off topic - you're never going to please everyone with every post. I thought this was cool. It made me go back in time a little and blab about kvm's a little which all my coworkers know is when of my biggest pet peeves (expensive/cheap ones don't work).

[Craig Horlacher]

You mean, it is not worth $80-$100 for a KVM switch which will SEAMLESSLY switch between computers, never dropping the load on the PS/2 and VGA ports (providing "virtual" mouse, keyboard, and monitor loads) so the drivers don't die, and at the same time supporting hotkeys for switching between machines?
...
If you are running computers you don't care about, and uptime is irrelevant, go the $20 mechanical KVM switch route.
I think I agree with you KimVette but I would be stunned it 80-100 it enough! In my experience I'd expect to pay $400 for a good 2 or maybe 4 port. If you need 16 ports or so I'd expect $1500-$3000 - and none of those prices include cables which you could expect to pay $70-$90 each for on those 16 port models.

Yeah, expensive stuff.

[gtmtnbiker98]

I haven't used a KVM for awhile now. I use RDP, TS, and in the event of Linux, I use an application called Putty to SSH. KVM's are a waste of time and I no longer use nor deploy them.

[Craig Horlacher]

I haven't used a KVM for awhile now. I use RDP, TS, and in the event of Linux, I use an application called Putty to SSH. KVM's are a waste of time and I no longer use nor deploy them.

Hmmm, if you have a server farm it seems you would need some type of physical human interface device multiplexing technology (hehehe, hidmt - just made it up, like it?!?!). Tools like Remote Administrator, VNC, and Windows Terminal Services are great but they can't get you on the system unless it's up in windows. Just last week I needed to be physically at a server to push f1 and get it back up. It was waiting for an f1 on bootup to continue since I have one of the drives from the mirror pulled. No software solution could have worked for this. If we had kvm over ip (hopfully we will soon) I could have fixed this from home.

[Perry Reed]

This is somewhat off-topic from the off-topic post (but sorta related)... But what I'd really like to see someone come out with is a small audio mixer so I can share my computer speakers with all of my computers and MP3 player at once. It doesn't need to be large or fancy, in fact the smaller the better, and it doesn't necessarily even need to be able to control the volume of each device (I can do that on the devices themselves), just let me plug all of my computers into my speakers at once so that if any of them give an audio notification (especially when, via the KVM I'm looking at another one) I can hear it and respond. Or listen to music from one while working, with sound, on another.

If anyone has seen something like this, I'd love to know about it.

[Craig Horlacher]

This is somewhat off-topic from the off-topic post (but sorta related)... But what I'd really like to see someone come out with is a small audio mixer so I can share my computer speakers with all of my computers and MP3 player at once. It doesn't need to be large or fancy, in fact the smaller the better, and it doesn't necessarily even need to be able to control the volume of each device (I can do that on the devices themselves), just let me plug all of my computers into my speakers at once so that if any of them give an audio notification (especially when, via the KVM I'm looking at another one) I can hear it and respond. Or listen to music from one while working, with sound, on another.

If anyone has seen something like this, I'd love to know about it.

Well, you should have at least one stereo in jack on your pc. You could run a 1/8" stereo cable from the out of one pc/mp3player/cd player/whatever to the in of the one with the speakers. In fact, you should be able to pass through for instance an mp3 player, pc, pc connected to speakers for instance. Watch the volume level of the middle pc as that could confuse things.

I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Planinum. I got it mainly because it gives me tons of in's and outs. Besides the usually 1/8" ports on the pci card I have a 5 1/4" bay with more ports! It's great. I have my logitech 5.1 speaker system hooked up to the rear ports. In the front I can plug in my iRiver 40GB jukebox into the optical in on the front of my pc and have a cable going from my pocket pc audio out to an in on my audigy right in the front of my pc also! That still leaves me with the rear in open and the spdif in/out's open.

So, I reccomend an sound blaster live/audigy/audigy 2/ all of which I think have version that include the "live drive" or whatever the 5 1/4 bay mounting panel is. It gives me all I need and a few more.

[Jon Westfall]

Just last week I needed to be physically at a server to push f1 and get it back up. It was waiting for an f1 on bootup to continue since I have one of the drives from the mirror pulled. No software solution could have worked for this. If we had kvm over ip (hopfully we will soon) I could have fixed this from home.

Oh do I HATE when a server is waiting at an asinine prompt during POST. Especially since the data center is 80 miles away! A KVM with some builtin logic to run VNC or RDP would be worth its weight in gold (Well, maybe not literally, but it would be worth the cost they are now in my opinion).

As far as the whole cheap/expensive KVM debate goes, I believe its probably a matter of experience. I've used pretty cheap KVMs and top-of-the-line, and never had a problem with either. I also work in a pretty small environment (Off-site consulting with occassionaly on-site installations and in-cabinet work), so my overall exposure is lower proportionally.

Oh, and physical human interface device was great. I'll add it to my other acronymns: ID10T Errors and PEBKAC meet PHID!

[larrybloom51]

You might not like this but here goes the KVM Question.

Well in the US there is about 120m-175M computer users out there

Say 10% power users which would use a 2 port KVM (12M)

Say about 1-2% for people who would use a 8-16 port KVM

Well no we have to bring a product to market

100,000 Say for engineering testing costs (this is cheep) could run in the mill

30,000 for each item in tooling costs

then warranty, Support, tooling, Misc costs which get cheaper per unit for a larger quantity...


They have to make a given amount of money to make a product... so you have to spread this costs over your potential customer base... Which lets say is 10% of the people which buy these things

so...
2 port KVM 1.2 Mill customers
8 port KVM 240,000 customers

you have to have higher margins for the 8 port to cover the fixed costs for bringing a product to market... Simple econ...


(please give me a break... the numbers are not accurate, but it is a good reflection of what the companies have to think about... also another mantra of a company of product... if you can get the higher margin... then get the higher margin... Look at apple)


and my answer for the missing commands is a risk reward issue... the user either on this machine or some other installation he left those command in there and it get rebooted at the wrong time... so he takes them out so he doesn't have that risk anymore...


and for the macro... well it is a security risk having it in there (which is probably not why it was removed)... if a software feature costs more in support then it help sell or improves a product... you remove it because it saves you money in supporting that feature... and other companies can make a product which they don't have the costs of support that Microsoft has...

[Sven Johannsen]

But what I'd really like to see someone come out with is a small audio mixer so I can share my computer speakers with all of my computers and MP3 player at once.

I've been looking for this myself. Actually wouldn't have been hard to build 20 years ago when Radio Shack still sold parts. Little mixer ICs and OP amps were plentifull. There are KVMA switches now that switch the audio as well as the KVM, but like you, I'd rather be listening to tunes on one machine I'm working with and have that error bonk come through from the one that just crapped itself.

I've even looked for little audio mixers, but haven't found anything that suits my requirement and doesn't cost more than the pc systems I'm trying to listen to.

[Darius Wey]

No FLAMES please. I just hope this is not the begining of hundreds of off topic posts.

Larry, I don't mean to beat the bush on this one. It's been covered time and time again, but it just doesn't seem to sink in. Here at Pocket PC Thoughts, we primarily deliver news about Pocket PCs and its accessories, but usually on the weekend, news is a little quiet. Not just here, but elsewhere too. And if other people don't work on the weekends, it means there's less to post on here (due to lack of content). So a good way to finish off the working week is to post a couple of thoughts, perhaps an off-topic post or two - just so there's something to think and talk about over the weekend. The site definitely isn't turning into an off-topic place, and I'm sure you've noticed that over the past couple of years - we hardly deviate from talking about Pocket PCs.

[ctmagnus]

oBut what I'd really like to see someone come out with is a small audio mixer so I can share my computer speakers with all of my computers and MP3 player at once.

I've been looking for this myself. Actually wouldn't have been hard to build 20 years ago when Radio Shack still sold parts. Little mixer ICs and OP amps were plentifull. There are KVMA switches now that switch the audio as well as the KVM, but like you, I'd rather be listening to tunes on one machine I'm working with and have that error bonk come through from the one that just crapped itself.

I've even looked for little audio mixers, but haven't found anything that suits my requirement and doesn't cost more than the pc systems I'm trying to listen to.

I've got a Cambridge SoundWorks speaker setup (can't remember the model, it's approaching four years old) that has a digital line in and two 1/8" jacks. I use it in conjunction with my four-port KVM switch. I can get a bong over the speakers from three computers at once with this setup.

[Gremmie]

you have to have higher margins for the 8 port to cover the fixed costs for bringing a product to market... Simple econ...

No, if the firm wanted to maximize profits (or minimize costs), it would attempt to make the marginal cost (that is, the cost to produce each unit) equal across the two different types. Therefore, assuming this, they wouldn't need to have higher margins. Higher margins would only come from the demand.

[maximus]

My opinion, in no particular order :


3. In Windows 3.1, we had a program called "Recorder" (Anyone remember it?) that allowed you to record macros. Anyone know why Microsoft removed it from Windows 95 and up? Was I the only person who used it ;)


In banking world (where I currently work), keystroke/macro recorders are THE ULTIMATE EVIL. Imagine when someone successfully installed recorder on the computers of the Fund Transfer Unit at the centralized operation of an large bank, where in a day, multiple billions of dollars are being transfered electronically.

All the user IDs and passwords are captured, all customer transaction details are captured ... anyone can use those IDs and passwords to execute unathorized fund transfer from all accounts in the bank. Anyone can use the transaction details to know other people's balance, transaction activity, etc.

Horrible.

Our banks actually required the installation of recorder killers on critical computers, to ensure that no such evil is alive on the PCs.


Can anyone offer me a good reason why they'd ever remove these commands from a box that only an administrator would ever have shell access to?


To minimize the possibility of erronous reboot ?


1. Ok, anyone who has ever priced KVM's (Keyboard-Video-Mouse switches) knows that these things can cost a bunch of money, and the cabling can outcost the unit at times (For example, a company I do work with purchased an 8-port KVM (2 terminal capable) for $199, and then purchased 8 sets of cables for $30 each). But why?


This has been a long term question of mine also. Perhaps the manufacturing of KVM switches needs to be moved to a sweat shop somewhere in south east asia to lower porduction cost ? :)

[personman]

I bought a used 4-port Black Box ServSwitch KVM on ebay and I paid less that $20. It's very nice.

[Perry Reed]

Well, you should have at least one stereo in jack on your pc. You could run a 1/8" stereo cable from the out of one pc/mp3player/cd player/whatever to the in of the one with the speakers. In fact, you should be able to pass through for instance an mp3 player, pc, pc connected to speakers for instance. Watch the volume level of the middle pc as that could confuse things.

That's not a bad idea. I'll look into my setup and see if my PC has enough inputs to do something like that, however, I have a feeling that it will not. At least not without going out and springing for a new sound card.

[Jon Westfall]

and for the macro... well it is a security risk having it in there (which is probably not why it was removed)

Somehow I think security was one of the last things on Microsoft's mind back in 1994-95, since the biggest exploiter of all time (i.e. Internet) was still in its general-public infancy then.

As far as the whole banking scenario - from what I remember of MS Recorder, it was not nearly as sophisticated as it would have had to been to pull off anything major security-breech wise. Recorder did not record keystrokes unless it was recording a macro, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to hide itself all that well when it was recording (After all, the name of it was Recorder - That probably would have tipped someone off!)

I guess it will just remain a mystery unless Bill Gates happens to be reading PPCT and has any insight ;)

[Perry Reed]

I guess it will just remain a mystery unless Bill Gates happens to be reading PPCT and has any insight ;)

Personally, I've never liked the "screen scrape" macro approach, like Recorder used. It was just too dependent on the UI and too sucseptible to even tiny changes in it, like a window or icon appearing in a different place on the screen.

I'd much rather use Windows Scripting Host, which is the "modern" method to write scripts for Windows. It's not as simple as a record-and-playback, but it's far more robust.

[journey]

I guess there are no unix-geeks on this list to post :D

re: no shutdown cmd
The only reason I could think of is that the person who did it, probably thought they were making the system harder to hack. Even MS servers can have a shutdown command. It takes a real genius to know how to use init (or to even know it exists ;-)

re: KVM
I purchased a 2-port KVM switch about 1 year ago for around US$20, including the 'attached' cables.

[DanielPirani]

Just want to endorse what a couple of other people have said in this topic. I have four 4-port KVMs which I bought brand new on eBay from this supplier: http://stores.ebay.com/Monoprice-Com_W0QQssPageNameZl2QQtZkm. Nobody should have to pay $199 for a KVM.

As a general point, eBay has opened up a new marketplace for fairly-priced electronics. By using eBay I haven't paid full price for new electronics for a couple of years now. Support those eBay sellers that support us with fair prices and good quality stuff. (But avoid the ones that overcharge for shipping).

[Mithras61]

Tools like Remote Administrator, VNC, and Windows Terminal Services are great but they can't get you on the system unless it's up in windows. Just last week I needed to be physically at a server to push f1 and get it back up. It was waiting for an f1 on bootup to continue since I have one of the drives from the mirror pulled. No software solution could have worked for this. If we had kvm over ip (hopfully we will soon) I could have fixed this from home.

Not trying to sound like a system promoter, but some servers have a remote functionality built into them that provides this ability without having to go to the server. For example, some HP ProLiant servers have a built in device called an iLO (integrated Lights Out) card. If you connect to it (browser over IP with authentication against your Windows domain), you can see everything at POST and beyond. It also has virtual power, virtual media and the abilty to do remote ROM flashes without you having to go be at the computer. This functionality actually goes all the way back to the mid-90s when ProLiants were a Compaq product. It's one of those "can't live without it" things I like about ProLiants. I'm sure other major manufacturers have similar functionality, but don't know those products as well. :)

[SweetJesus]

Question 1.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=kvm&amp;btnG=Search+Froogle&amp;scoring=p

Question 2.
http://www.google.com/search?num=20&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;safe=off&amp;c2coff=1&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&amp;q=bofh&amp;btnG=Search

Question 3.
http://www.google.com/search?num=20&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;safe=off&amp;c2coff=1&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&amp;q=macro+recorder+site%3Amicrosoft.com&amp;btnG=Search

[mrmagoo]

> A KVM is a pretty simple thing, and while I'm not electrical engineer, I really can't fathom it takes too much programming or circuitry to switch my I/O from one set of ports to another...

Ask a signal integrity engineer (a specialized electrical engineer) this question. You'll get a responce which will likely include terms like a) matched impedance (inductive and capcitive load), b) propogation delay and jitter, c) crosstalk interference, and d) signal degradation.

If your trying to drive your monitor at 2048x1536 at 75hz, the analog frequency is high enough and the length of cable long enough that if you aren't using matched impedance line and load, you will start seeing signal reflection. Since the connection from the PC to the KVM to the monitor can be upwards of a few meters, even though the KVM might be amplifying the signal (which also degrades the signal), you will get signal degradation. Since the monitor is driven using analog signals, the cable itself is never a perfect impedance. It has different inductive and capactive impedance dependent on the frequency of the signal. What this causes is jitter, that is the signal arrives at the monitor at different times. If the cable that carries the analog signals if not properly shielded it will pickup 60hz EMI from your power cables and anything else that's producing EMR.

What does this amount to? A degraded image on your CRT/LCD display. A signal integrity engineer would ensure that the components are selected correctly (cable, signal drivers, signal switching circuitry) to ensure that the degradation of the signal doesn't adversely affect the user.

Certainly, if your driving your monitors at a 60hz at VGA resolution, the design and component selection aren't as critical. But, the product has to be able to support a somewhat higher end configuration to ensure that the product is useable by most users.