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220 of 222 people found the following review helpful:
So bad. So so bad. Wouldnt take more if they were free. If they paid me even., May 18, 2007
This has got to be the most horrid piece of hardware to ever enter my life.
Like an idiot, I ordered six of these as I was building up a new server room. Every single day I spend in the office I regret this decision.
Why this is a piece of junk:
a/ The on-screen-display (OSD) feels like it was written for a high school computer science project, by a football player. You cannot see the OSD unless the current port selected is getting an active video signal from the currently chosen host. In other words, if you shutdown the current server and the video card stops sending a signal, you are locked out of the OSD! If you are moving down the list of ports on the OSD and hit a port that has no active machine connected to it, you lose the OSD! To clear this you must hit the refresh button on the KVM itself a few times.
b/ The labels you assign to each KVM port from the OSD can very easily disappear att at once, reverting back to "Channel 1" "Channel 2" etc.
There is a very easy to typo keyboard shortcut for
"clear all the machine names from the OSD all at once without telling me it has happened". This command btw is NOT listed on the OSD menu itself, so it is even more infuriating when it happens, since you are not really sure what you did you did to wipe all your configs out.
c/ The mouse emulation is even worse than the OSD (somehow). If you intend on using this KVM on your Linux cluster, forget about it. More often than not, the following will occur: your machine will not POST until you unplug the mouse, if using GNOME your mouse will go into 'crazy mouse' mode, hitting random places on your desktop dozens of times a second, when you use the scroll wheel on the mouse, your pointer either locks up or disappears. Due to the above issues, I had a very important server get rebooted in the middle of the day (the crazy mouse must have hit the Log Off menu, then the Shutdown button, then pressed the mouse at exactly the right moment). You can possibly fix this issue by adding this line to your GRUB config btw, but this seems like a dumb workaround for a product that shouldn't suck so much in the first place:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet psmouse.proto=bare
d/ The channel names on the OSD are not in alphabetical order. There is actually no way to sort them at all. A minor inconvenience yes, but when added to the rest it becomes yet another reason to hate this product.
e/ The characters you can use on the OSD are limited to alphanumeric only. No -, no /, no ", no anything else but '[a-Z][1-0]'. This is really annoying if you have machines called for example "test-01" or "cvs-branch-02". There is also no Backspace function, you must left arrow back to the very beginning and re-type your machine name. The characters typed also have a nasty habit of being entered twice if you type more than 20 words per minutes, which in addition to the fact there is no backspace means entering the same machine name multiple times until the KVM is happy.
f/ The "special" daisy-chain cables Belkin wants to sell you for up to $100 a piece, are simple straight through db-25 serial cables. Of course they say their fancy gold plated blah blah blah is far superior to anything else out there. Do not waste your money on these cables, it is a rip-off stacked on top of a bigger rip-off.
I have spent a considerable amount of time online, looking through IT and Sysadmin forums, reading other peoples' experiences who have the same exact issues I have had with these units. These problems have been around for a long time, and there is no apparent fix, or even acknowledgment, of these issues from Belkin.
And if you think you will have better luck using this KVM on your Windows machines, guess again. All of the OSD issues will still be there, and, I have seen the mouse go into crazy mouse mode on XP Pro SP2 machines.
Avoid these units at all costs. They are barely worth being free if you want to use them in a production environment. Having your CVS machines reboot because of some terrible mouse emulation, or spending an extra 10 minutes finding the machine you desperately need to work on because the on screen display has cleared the list of servers at the exact moment you need it the most, is NOT worth saving a few hundred dollars in the short, medium, or long term.
Just don't do it. Don't buy these units. Please.
If someone from Belkin would like to contact me for their chance to explain these issues and offer solutions, I would be more than happy to discuss them and amend this review. Until then, I will put these units up for auction and hope some greater fool will take them off my hands.
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 Belkin OmniView PRO2 8-port PS/2 KVM Switch with Cables ( F1DA108P-B ) B000HCVCRQ
Belkin Components
Belkin OmniView PRO2 8-port PS/2 KVM Switch with Cables ( F1DA108P-B )
Electronics
So bad. So so bad. Wouldnt take more if they were free. If they paid me even.
This has got to be the most horrid piece of hardware to ever enter my life.
Like an idiot, I ordered six of these as I was building up a new server room. Every single day I spend in the office I regret this decision.
Why this is a piece of junk:
a/ The on-screen-display (OSD) feels like it was written for a high school computer science project, by a football player. You cannot see the OSD unless the current port selected is getting an active video signal from the currently chosen host. In other words, if you shutdown the current server and the video card stops sending a signal, you are locked out of the OSD! If you are moving down the list of ports on the OSD and hit a port that has no active machine connected to it, you lose the OSD! To clear this you must hit the refresh button on the KVM itself a few times.
b/ The labels you assign to each KVM port from the OSD can very easily disappear att at once, reverting back to "Channel 1" "Channel 2" etc.
There is a very easy to typo keyboard shortcut for
"clear all the machine names from the OSD all at once without telling me it has happened". This command btw is NOT listed on the OSD menu itself, so it is even more infuriating when it happens, since you are not really sure what you did you did to wipe all your configs out.
c/ The mouse emulation is even worse than the OSD (somehow). If you intend on using this KVM on your Linux cluster, forget about it. More often than not, the following will occur: your machine will not POST until you unplug the mouse, if using GNOME your mouse will go into 'crazy mouse' mode, hitting random places on your desktop dozens of times a second, when you use the scroll wheel on the mouse, your pointer either locks up or disappears. Due to the above issues, I had a very important server get rebooted in the middle of the day (the crazy mouse must have hit the Log Off menu, then the Shutdown button, then pressed the mouse at exactly the right moment). You can possibly fix this issue by adding this line to your GRUB config btw, but this seems like a dumb workaround for a product that shouldn't suck so much in the first place:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet psmouse.proto=bare
d/ The channel names on the OSD are not in alphabetical order. There is actually no way to sort them at all. A minor inconvenience yes, but when added to the rest it becomes yet another reason to hate this product.
e/ The characters you can use on the OSD are limited to alphanumeric only. No -, no /, no ", no anything else but '[a-Z][1-0]'. This is really annoying if you have machines called for example "test-01" or "cvs-branch-02". There is also no Backspace function, you must left arrow back to the very beginning and re-type your machine name. The characters typed also have a nasty habit of being entered twice if you type more than 20 words per minutes, which in addition to the fact there is no backspace means entering the same machine name multiple times until the KVM is happy.
f/ The "special" daisy-chain cables Belkin wants to sell you for up to $100 a piece, are simple straight through db-25 serial cables. Of course they say their fancy gold plated blah blah blah is far superior to anything else out there. Do not waste your money on these cables, it is a rip-off stacked on top of a bigger rip-off.
I have spent a considerable amount of time online, looking through IT and Sysadmin forums, reading other peoples' experiences who have the same exact issues I have had with these units. These problems have been around for a long time, and there is no apparent fix, or even acknowledgment, of these issues from Belkin.
And if you think you will have better luck using this KVM on your Windows machines, guess again. All of the OSD issues will still be there, and, I have seen the mouse go into crazy mouse mode on XP Pro SP2 machines.
Avoid these units at all costs. They are barely worth being free if you want to use them in a production environment. Having your CVS machines reboot because of some terrible mouse emulation, or spending an extra 10 minutes finding the machine you desperately need to work on because the on screen display has cleared the list of servers at the exact moment you need it the most, is NOT worth saving a few hundred dollars in the short, medium, or long term.
Just don't do it. Don't buy these units. Please.
If someone from Belkin would like to contact me for their chance to explain these issues and offer solutions, I would be more than happy to discuss them and amend this review. Until then, I will put these units up for auction and hope some greater fool will take them off my hands.
enantiodromia
May 18, 2007
- Overall: 5
- Overall: 5
 
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Review Details
Location: San Fran Bay Area
New Reviewer Rank: 7,288
Classic Reviewer Rank: 25,697
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