[H-GEN] using one monitor with 2 pc's

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Ronald Bradford wrote:

> Have you considered just doing a VNC to the second machine from the 
> first machine, giving you all the functionality with a single 
> keyboard,mouse,monitor and not additional expense. -K-I-S-S-

Troy noted that he uses ssh to access the boxes.  What he is after is 
something to use when the network is not accessible.  This is a "necessary 
evil" of running boxes that are accessed almost exclusively over the 
network.

The rest of my post is aimed primarily at Troy,

KVMs have been discussed at length.  They are a good solution but they can 
be relatively expensive when all the cables are added in.

As an alternative I suggest investigating serial consoles.  For most PCs 
this gives access to everything except the BIOS.  Some PCs even allow 
access to the BIOS via the serial console.

You can run a dedicated "console server" or you can have the two boxes act 
as console for each other.  As long as one is on the network the console 
of the other is available.  If you want to consider going down this path 
the list can discuss the security implications further.

Rob

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