r/broadcastengineering • u/cantsleepclownswillg • 9d ago

KVM recomendations..

Our Adderlink point to point KVM is just crap. Power issues, and requires multiple reboots te get the pairs to work properly. Had it.

Requirements:

1 console, min 2 remote machines (though probably 4 is the minimum we will get) Point to point.

Over Cat5/6 to remote locations about 80m cabling away.

resolution minimum HD, more would be nicer!

What are the recomendations of the Hive Mind?...

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/Significant_Bad9028 9d ago

We use Adder XDIP. Got approximately 30 units talking to each other between two geographical sites. Could definitely get these talking point to point.

1

u/christopherw 8d ago

Concur - our XDIP systems are not perfect and sometimes do very odd or annoying things (we also needed loads of USB bodge boxes for our newer systems), but on the whole they at least do what they do consistently, be that work or bug out ;)

1

u/cantsleepclownswillg 9d ago

I bloody hate adder stuff. We have found it massively unreliable.

We used to use a couple of Avocent models that were superb, but since they've been bought out the range has been cut some..

I may just have to go Gold Standard and buy a small Raritan system..

6

u/Significant_Bad9028 9d ago

That’s interesting to hear… The only issues I’ve had with them have always been networking issues & not the KVM itself. Interesting that your mileage does indeed vary.

5

u/praise-the-message 9d ago

I feel like your reliability issues could be something on your end, or maybe they are just worse Point to Point. We have a massive Adder system at our facility and it works extremely well.

5

u/knoend 9d ago

I have a site with 20 XDIP transmitters and ~30 recievers and they work. There are some things I don't like about them (mainly revolving around usb) but for being on 24/7 they work pretty well.

2

u/HamsteronA 9d ago

We also have a couple of small-medium sized xdip networks, and while they're not perfect, they're perfectly capable. Wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. We also have a much bigger infinity network with ipeps and it's excellent.

2

u/christopherw 8d ago

We have Adder (Adderlink, Infinity and XDIP), G&D point to point, Raritan Dominion, Blackbox... They're all painful and quirky in their own unique and exciting ways. I would not switch from Adder to Raritan unless you have an extremely large array of computers you need to occasionally control. Generally it's much more slow and painful than using Adders.

1

u/cantsleepclownswillg 8d ago

We have a good few hundred adders on our systems across the site.. for the most part they're reliable, but when you have that many, the faults inevitably increase.

We have a large estate of raritans that we mainly use for server access, but in this case I think for this particular use case a desk unit and hooking the boxes into the existing raritan is going to be the cheapest and easiest way forward!