From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon Jan  4 19:01:21 1999
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Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 18:58:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Steve Willoughby <steve@alchemy.com>
To: Ludwig Pummer <ludwigp@bigfoot.com>
cc: rick hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com>, Marc Giannoni <marc@versa.eng.comsat.com>,
        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Console Switchboxes
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On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Ludwig Pummer wrote:
> Get yourself a nice non-mechanical switchbox. You'll end up doing so in the
> future when the cheap one becomes unusable.

Definately.  But I'm having this problem even then.  I have a pair of 
nice non-mechanical switchboxes which do all the keyboard-spoofing to
all hosts and all that (i.e., if a machine boots, it "sees" a keyboard
even if it's not the one switched to the actual keyboard).

This one (Belkin OmniView) is cascadable so that you can put up to 64
systems on a single console, like this:
               _______
[monitor]-----|       | 
[keyboard]----|_______|
               | | | |      _______
       [cpu1]__| | | |_____|       |
       [cpu2]____| |       |_______|
       [cpu3]______|        | | | |
       [cpu4]_______________| | | |
       [cpu5]_________________| | |
       [cpu6]___________________| |
       [cpu7]_____________________|

but it's not behaving like the manual claims it should either.  I get
the same "keyboard loss" problem when switching to any of the CPUs on
the 2nd-tier switchbox.  I have to power-cycle the 1st-tier box to get 
them back.  So nothing's a perfect solution, it seems :)

I guess that's a long winded way to say "Yes, I agree", but you never
know if someone else out there has seen the same issues with the same
hardware.

-Steve



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