Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#281

Post by mtlynch » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

erikig wrote: post #101

mtlynch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, that was inspired by my experience of searching cooking recipes online.

Which begs the question - which cooking recipes start off with a biography of the author? Now I want to see those!

Oh, they all kind of do that. "Life story" is an exaggeration, but most recipe authors provide a lot of fluff backstory to a recipe before sharing the instructions because Google seems to favor longer content in search results. Here's a not so egregious example on a blog I follow, but it's ~8 paragraphs of fluff before they explain the recipe:

https://www.ketoconnect.net/protein-waffle-recipe/

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#282

Post by hakfoo » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

_1qd4 wrote: post #42

dukoid wrote: post #37

I have given up on KVMs altogether and I am using the following approach now: - Most monitors have multiple digital inputs. Connect each computer to one of them - Use a USB switch keyboard and mouse - Before switching the USB switch, press the "lock screen" key combination and make sure locking the screen drops the video signal - After switching the USB switch, pressing shift should bring up the login dialog and re-a…

I did this for a while, the problem is that there's really no such thing as a high-quality USB switch. They are all garbage and mess with USB devices in some way (at least at the consumer level).

The USB side always worked fine for me. The problems tended to be mostly video related.

I have a HDMI KVM switch that's supposed to be 4k@60. One PC won't detect it as such; I can make a custom 1440p at 42Hz mode but nothing higher. The other will send 4k/@60, but the monitor will do one of 4 or so failure modes:

* Entire screen compressed to half width: 50% * Correct behaviour: 20% * Correct display, occasionally flipping to black screen: 10% * Gatbled screen: 5% * No synch: 15%

Switching input is a game of toggling back and forth until it synchs correctly.

None of this happens with a direct connection.

The switch also doesn't seem to detect when I set up a keyboard macro for the switch-input sequence (control-control-1/2/3/4) but that's not nearly the dealbreaker.

I'm not sure if it's the switch or the monitor being relatively intolerant of the switch's behaviour, but I don't want to toss around $100-300 on spares to diagnose this.

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#283

Post by voltagex_ » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #237

voltagex_ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the recent Supermicros have a HTML5 iKVM, but mine originally came with a Java-only thing. When I had to send my box away to get repaired (Intel C2000 bug) it magically came back with a newer firmware that wasn't listed on their site and supported HTML5. I haven't been able to get remote ISOs working with the new interface, though.

At my last job, some of the Supermicro servers I worked with needed their SSD firmware updated. The hosting company's firmware update tool didn't actually update the SSD firmware (ugh) and it took forever, so I started doing the updates with remote ISOs, but some of the hosts had gone through the hosting company's tool which sometimes updated the IPMI firmware even though I didn't tell it to (double ugh). For those,…

Yeah, I think PXELINUX and iPXE are using the same kind of tricks to load ISOs like this (if anyone wants to do a writeup I'd love to read it). I think I'm going to have to dig in and understand the "redfish" API that also appeared with the update.

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#284

Post by plett » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #66

Haemm0r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works, however you need a non-free special client called VNC Viewer Plus [1]. Afaik it is Windows only. You can enable regular VNC protocol capabilities for AMT[2], but then you can't use the interesting stuff anymore. [1] https://www.realvnc.com/en/products/viewerplus/ [2] https://blog.michael.kuron-germany.de/2011/10/using-intel-am... //edit: link [2] added.

This seems to show a reasonable option from Linux: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/remotely-access-intel-amt-kvm-...

I've used instructions similar to those to get AMT KVM working with a normal VNC client, it works fine. The only catch is that the AMT seems to intercept all traffic to port 5900 coming in through the NIC, not just that addressed to the IP of the AMT. It's only the "legacy" port 5900 VNC which is affected, the other ports such as 16992 for AMT's web admin are unaffected.