[croutonwagon]

One of the recent ones I did was a Pi-KVM.

https://imgur.com/a/AVxuR0d

Im honestly considering deploying these at work to replace some aging (and expensive) dell, java based ipkvms. I like it enough i made a second one to attach to a small headless desktop. Mainly just as a cheap quasi-OOB management.

Mine use h.264/webrtc or html5/mjpeg and on one i even hooked it up to a smaller kvm to give me a 4 port switcher via the webUI. Pretty slick and all told was under $400 for a 4-port model. A single pikvm, including the case and everything was about 100 bucks.

With some systems (ie: supermicro) and a ribbon cable, you could rig up ATX controls as well.

[marcosdumay]

On the subject of IP-KVMs, I miss¹ something that I can plug on the USB of several computers, and access them by the bare serial interface, without messing with video capture and peripheral emulation. It would be something much simpler than the things available today, even requiring less wires.

The main issue I see with it is that it would need to connect to multiple host USBs and only one client.

1 - I actually don't miss it anymore because I'm not in a situation to use it, but I used to miss it.

[croutonwagon]

Not sure i follow.

In this case. Its basically a single USB cable and a HDMI/Video cable.

All the Mouse/Keyboard etc is emulated through USB. Which is pretty nice. That was the best part for me. And with modern standards the lag was noticeable, but minimal. That said, in my cases, im just using SSH or something anyway. This was more for outage situations, or in a situation where i need to make a BIOS change remotely etc.

[marcosdumay]

Oh, you have 1 of those for each server, like a normal IP-KVM. So there's a network, a video and a USB cable for each server, plus the server cables.

It should be able to build a device where you use an extra USB for each server plus one network cable for each 4, 8, whatever (if you push it, your entire hack).

To use it, you would SSH into the pi, and use a command to get a server.

The serial interface is quite old, everything tends to be accessible there. But now that you mentioned, I'm not sure you can update the BIOS with it.

[croutonwagon]

So you can do that if you want, you would probably need some USB hubs to accomplish, and probably a logical way to map out your serial connections, but it should be doable.

https://docs.pikvm.org/usb_serial/

Or in the case of how I did it, i setup a multi-port KVM, that allowed me to manage x number of devices (with video) from a single unit. In this instance, a serial connection was used from the pi to the actual KVM which allowed me to switch inputs etc, from the gui.

https://docs.pikvm.org/multiport/

https://docs.pikvm.org/ezcoo/

https://docs.pikvm.org/multiport/