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  • I have an OG JetKVM and it works solidly but the thing that prevents me from using it is no video pass through. The awkwardness of an ‘invisible’ monitor connected to windows at all times is hard to live with - windows and apps open there and I’m constantly having to pull them back to an another monitor. My next KVM will be pass through for this reason, but the consumer ones seem to top out at 4k30, which is not great either.
    by doctorhandshake
  • How do you reboot the target machine and stay powered?

    I know some ipkvm can interface with the ATX header, but that's usually an extra addon. It also requires have some access to the ATC header during installation.

    I have a tiny "NAS" where the mobo is the size of credit card and very difficult to access. The power supply is external. The USB doesn't stay powered when turned off.

    I cobbled together a bare NanoKVM running debian, a relay normally closed to interrupt mains power to the target, and a tiny little power supply into a 3D printed case. I have also added a diode so that the ipkvm can also be powered by the target USB for flexibility. Note that the sg200x boots with its pin pulled high with a ~50kΩ resistor (pullup). So you need to pull it down with a 1kΩ resistor. This also renders the system more robust to transient voltages anyways.

    https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM/introduction...

    https://github.com/slcpcom/sophgo-sg200x-debian

    by bombela
  • It may be worth noting that this is not _that_ KVM, but this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch

    I learnt this first myself from HN, a few months ago.

    by theanonymousone
  • I am amazed that there is an ESP that can handle this and with just 32MB of RAM:

    https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e...

    by teruakohatu
  • I have 4 of the old ones in service and they're great. Whenever I need to remotely reboot a server those come in handy just great, no more fear of what I'm going to do if the server doesn't come back online.

    It also solved the issue I had with entering a password on FDE (full disk encryption) systems. Previously I had to rely on a janky solution with booting into BusyBox so that the system can be accessed remotely and using that to enter the password. Now it's just plain FDE set up during Debian install - I reboot, use JetKVM to enter the password and that's it.

    One note though - I don't use their online cloud service access thingy and connect to those using my Wireguard deployment. The hardware is nice, open source is nice, but I wouldn't trust that level of access to any cloud solution by any vendor.

    by mszcz
  • If you have an Intel CPU, there is a good chance you have a KVM built-in (whether you wanted one or not): Intel AMT. Its reputation was tarnished by Intel's dissimulation and opacity about the technology, and a streak of critical vulnerabilities disclosed in late 2017. I chose to take my chances with it anyway for my homelab server. It is secured with a password, mutual TLS (client has to provide a cert), and restricted to the LAN via a physical firewall. It gives me serial console, KVM, and power control.

    I like it. It works pretty well. I don't see a reason to trust it any less than closed-hardware, closed-source solutions. I would trust a fully-open-source PIKVM more, however.

    The tooling and documentation for setting up Intel AMT via open-source tools is meagre, so I had to roll my own. I only need a small nudge to package it for others to re-use, so reply to this post if you are interested.

    by atdt
  • I own 3 JetKVMs, of which two of them stopped working, one of which doesn't boot at all and the other that never connects to network. The third I took out of service because the keyboard wouldn't send input when it was connected for more than a couple months. I'm sure the newer hardware is better, but I'm very unhappy with my JetKVMs.
    by Shank
  • This author has tested a lot of IP KVMs and compares them in this post: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/i-tested-every-ip-kvm...

    He likes JetKVM. However, they appear to be sold out. The Mini seems great but I have yet to receive a preordered item on the advertised timeline.

    That article pointed to ArkKVM which is a hardware clone of JetKVM but they have now released their own software stack as open source which has Tailscale support

    * https://store.arkkvm.com/blog/detail/arkkvm-fully-open-sourc...

    * https://store.arkkvm.com/blog/detail/arkkvm-ota-release-note...

    by gregwebs

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