Re: Using a KVM switch to connect 3 computers at once

On Sun, 03 Dec 2023 10:12:31 -0500, micky <[email protected]> wrote:
> I never had any  trouble with the KVM switch but when this works, it
> allows copy and paste to span pc's and that's really nice, and saves me
> a lot of time. We'll see if its annoyances outweight its benefits.

I do get the problem, but very rarely. I'm not sure of the cause, but I think
it's either very high cpu usage (on either computer), or very heavy network
usage, causing an interruption in it's connection.

When that does happen, I restart it rather then wait. I'd forgotten about that
rare problem when I was describing it before. For me, it's a minor inconvenience.

I've never had the mouse cursor get stuck on the client computer. It that's
happening for you, it's likely due to a windows/linux difference in hardware
handling and windows allowing a program to take control of the hardware, which
IIRC is usually used in some games.

On linux, restarting it when it stops working just requires killing the program
and restarting it, which is easy to do.

I also have mouse/keyboard on each computer, which is needed to login and
when necessary, restart synergy. As I don't use the gui, I just run a script.

On the server system ...
#!/bin/bash
killall -9 synergys 2>/dev/null
synergys -n desktop --debug FATAL

On the client system ...
#!/bin/bash
killall -9 synergyc 2>/dev/null
synergyc --name rp4 --restart --debug FATAL 192.168.10.2

Those scripts are the ones I use to autostart it when I login, or to manually
restart it when it loses it's connection.

The three programs involved are:
synergy  - the gui program used for setup,
synergys - the server program that has the physical connection to the
            mouse/keyboard being shared
synergyc - the client program on the computer that receives the
            mouse/keyboard activity.

On linux, the killall program tells the kernel to send a signal to the program
to close it's files and terminate, aka SIGTERM.

Adding the -9 option for the killall tells the kernel to terminate the program
even if it has open files, aka SIGKILL, which is needed in this case.

If you can find a way to kill and restart the client and server programs, you
won't have to wait for it to eventually reestablish the connection on it's own.
The other option is to reboot, which will do the same.

Regards, Dave Hodgins