The following might help someone else trying to use a KVM with a newer ThinkPad docking station...
I spoke with IBM support about this issue yesterday. Their initial response was "we don't support KVM switches." After having the call transfered to their next tier of support someone did tell me that they get a lot of calls from people trying to use KVMs. It seems that few if any of the consumer KVM switches out there will work with Thinkpad docking stations. The KVM I have is a Belkin Omni View SE 4 port model. Others that seem to fail include the D-Link and ATEN Master View. It seems odd that many other computer systems work fine with these KVMs but the ThinkPad does not. The folks at IBM are going to try and at least figure out what the problem is, but eventually they will probably just say "sorry, not supported."
After the conversation with them I decided to pull a high-end rack mounted KVM out of our server rack to try with the ThinkPad. Guess what - yup, it worked like a champ. No problem with lost keyboard functionality or intermittent mouse activity when switching between systems. The switch is an older Cybex AutoView Commander. I think they have been acquired by Avocet.
Does anyone know what the difference might be between the consumer switches and these higher-end server switches?
Cheers
-- Bennett
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Received on Tue Feb 17 10:39:07 2004
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