[geeks] Shrinking the Sun Farm

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Jonathan Groll <lists at groll.co.za>
>Date: 2007/04/24 Tue AM 04:09:43 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Shrinking the Sun Farm

>On Sun, Apr 22, 2007 at 05:53:06PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Sun, 22 Apr 2007 @ 14:27 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:
> 
>> I would not mind having a desktop Sun and KVM it with my PC. I guess it
>> would be easiest if the Sun in question used PC keyboards and mice.
>>
>
>Have you thought about running synergy (its in pkgsrc)? It allows you to
>control multiple machines running X from a single workstation with a
>single keyboard and mouse.

OK, two things:

First, none of the attributed quote is from me - no biggie, but I was not the original poster.

Second, I don't think that solution grants the user console access, and that can be important in certain situations.

For a production environment, both a software solution like Synergy, Remote Desktop Protocol, or VNC and a hardware KVM have their uses, but neither replaces the other in all cases.

Software tools alow you to manage multiple servers remotely once they are up and running, a hardware KVM solution grants greater access to multiple machines (POST, console, etc.).

I got a nice outlook KVM that handles 10 Sun machines, but I was challeneged to find 13W3 and Sun keyboard/mouse cables to use. This particular KVM had both a 13W3/Sun keyboard/mouse console port and a SVGA/PS/2 mouse keyboard console port (only one was usable at a time, either one or the other, not both) - allowing me to use an SVGA/PS/2 KVM extender over cat5 to remotely access my Sun consoles...

Lionel