Was at Networld+Interop last week. I am quite loathe towards trade shows. Highlight of the event was actually telling my idea for an inverse-KVM to Avocent & Startech. The fellows at the Startech booth eyes lit up and they said "That's a -really- good idea." Well, I knew that already - but hopefully they'll actually implement it.

My only hope is that if they do they'll offer up some sort of BSD licensed driver/software.

For those curious about what I'm talking about (not that I imagine many people are reading this). How many times have you wanted to plug into a headless machine but didn't want to lug around a monitor, keyboard and mouse? Note, if you are using a serial console this is a moot point (one reason why non-x86 stuff still has advantages in the server world for sure).

Anyway, you have a laptop, right? It's already got a video display, a keyboard and some kind of pointer (touchpad, trackpoint). Why not just use that? Long ago, I thought gee it'd be nice if a laptop just had an input mode [like the Fn-output key mode to display to a video projector]. That's not very universal though. Soooooo, better yet - make it a PCMCIA/Cardbus/Newcard/whatever card with a squid cable that extends to a VGA, PS/2 [or USB, or hell we could do other crap ass stuff like ADB or Sun]. Then you just interact with the headless machine using your laptop. So, inverse KVM is the best way of describing it.

It would be incredibly useful for any IT person, and I doubt it would even cost more than a few hundred. Pack in an option to have multiple different cable types [so you're not bound just to VGA/PS/2] and it would be super duper useful.

Like I said, the folks at the Startech booth actually seemed to -get- it, so hopefully they'll build it. As long as they kept me in the loop [just to let me know it had been made] maybe gave me some credit somewhere and released a BSD/MIT licensed driver I would be stoked.