"Jim Thompson" wrote in
message ...
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 23:36:45 GMT, Tim Hubberstey
wrote:

On 2007-07-18 17:48, Jim Thompson wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:17:58 -0500, Ben Jackson wrote:

On 2007-07-18, Jim Thompson
wrote:
I want to switch a _USB_ mouse between multiple PC's.

Anyone know any tricks to fake out the unconnected PC's so they think
the mouse is there, but not sending data.
USB is all mastered by the host. The host (or both, in this case)
constantly interrogate the mouse to give it a chance to send back
movement info. You could try just switching in the right sense
resistors
to claim the device is present, but when it stops responding things
will
probably go badly.

Have you considered something like this:

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Interesting, might be worth hacking a KVM to switch based on running
off the screen edge with the mouse.

The next step is to dispense with the KVM switch altogether and run one
of the variants of VNC. I use TightVNC but don't remember why I chose it
(Now where DID I put those old brain cells?).

http://www.tightvnc.com/intro.html

You use one machine as the "master" and connect your mouse, keyboard and
display to it and on the "slave" machines you run a VNC server. On the
master you run a "viewer" session for each slave you want to control and
then switch between them like any other Windows app. Be sure to use the
DFMirage mirror driver on the slaves.

This is a very viable solution as long as your network is fast and there
aren't too many screen updates happening on the slaves. Since you
already have a KVM, you can leave it in place and only switch it when
the bandwidth hit would be too high.

Since I have a new laptop on the way, and with wireless available just
about everywhere, I've been contemplating VNC to allow me to load a
PSpice sim on my office machine while I'm off-site at a client's
location.

Having never done it, I have lots of questions... number one being,
Can I get through my router and access the four machines tied to it?

...Jim Thompson

The answer is yes with a VPN or, if you don't mine remote admin to your
router,
you can dispense with VPN and use remote desktop alone. These tools are
built into WinXP Pro so please tell me that's all you buy!

For instance, I just finished updating 3 computers in Austin from Dallas.
Since they lack a VPN, I altered the destination IP of port 3389 each time I
went to a different computer. I have set static IP within their domain so
each
workstation has a known IP. This function is in the port forwarding section
which
is sometimes a subset of gaming within the router menus.