Control ANY COMPUTER with these Pi KVMs!

out of laziness many of the greatest it inventions are born and today's topic kvms specifically the tiny pilot voyager and the pi kvm v3 they're tricked out raspberry pi's and they can remotely manage any mac pc or server just like you were sitting in front of it in a strange coincidence both project's founders emailed to see if i wanted to test their pi kvms in the same week michael lynch who founded tinypilot said he learned a lot of ansible for my blog and he used ansible to build the tiny pilot update system so to thank me he sent me a tiny pilot to play with and max devive behind pi kvm loved my open source work and offered a pi kvm v3 a hat and hardware kit that allows even more control including atx power control and hardware status led integration it's been a couple months and i'm finally ready to share my thoughts about these devices but first what's the use of an ipkvm most computers can run remote desktop or vnc why would you want a separate hardware kvm well a few reasons first you can emulate plugging in a usb flash drive so you can remotely wipe provision or restore a pc from scratch just like you were sitting in front of it second you could put the ipkvm in front of a cheap 2 4 or 8 port kvm and take full control of multiple computers at the same time without running anything on the computers themselves third if your kvm supports it you can remote control every aspect of any pc or mac just like you'd get with ipmi or redfish on expensive servers ipmi is a set of interfaces allowing out of band management servers and data centers don't even need to be booted for admins to maintain them that same tech is built into pi kvm you can do things like physically reset or power on the computer say if it's shut down or locked up or see if the activity led is blinking you could even shut down a computer and install a completely new os on it without being anywhere near it gone are the days of home labs like me wasting my time walking all the way around the basement just to restart a locked up pie but why use a raspberry pi as a kvm proprietary kvm over ipa devices have been around a while but most of them are expensive and they're hard to upgrade or customize the raspberry pi is inexpensive has a lot of i o in a tiny package and runs a well-supported open source operating system a lot of the tools required to build a great kvm are already there so first let's start with things both kvms do well you plug your server's hdmi output and usb port into the kvm and you can have complete control over the computer even before it boots up you can access bios or uafi settings so you have more fine-grained debugging access if something goes wrong on a server you can mount a virtual disk image through usb and then boot off it to repair or reinstall an os the ui for both devices is entirely in the web browser and they're both easy to use you don't have to install any extra software on the computer you're controlling and the latency over a gigabit network is usually around 100 to 300 milliseconds depending on your network and compression options but let's dig into a few crucial differences first the tiny pilot it was ready to go out of the box and it also comes with an easy update system i think if you just want to buy something plug it in and you don't need any of the additional features pi kvm adds the tiny pilot is a great option if you buy the 350 voyager you get a year of support and updates if you buy the kit version or build your own and just use the community open source version of the tiny pilot software you're on your own for keeping it updated there are a few features like web ui tls support and authentication that are behind a yearly subscription paywall but like i said i think if you want a turnkey solution where you just buy it plug it in use it and basically forget about it and you can live with a narrower feature set for a bit more money it's a great option the pi kvm is best for those who either need a deeper set of features or love to tinker setup was a little more difficult since it comes as a kit and you have to assemble all the parts yourself some of the parts could do with better labeling too after i put together the case i realized i had no idea which port did what so i spent some time printing my own labels for it once the hardware is set up though the ui is easy to pick up and things worked with no fuss the pi kvm has a lot more hardware support for atx control like power reset and activity light integration and there are add-ons and software support that make it able to manage darn near anything even through old and exotic interfaces another feature pi kvm has enabled out of the box is read-only file system which can help extend the life of a micro sd card if you're booting the pi from it you can still switch modes easily on the command line if you need to change settings or update the system what i liked most about pi kvm is the community especially the help you can get through discord or github it seemed like tiny pilot was centered more around the subscription model whereas pi kvm is a little more community oriented both have their benefits and drawbacks and i'm reminded of a classic computer science book the cathedral and the bazaar basically the tiny pilot is like a cathedral it has more limitations and it's built with a more narrow focus and you're not going to see as diverse a feature set but it is easy to drop in and use and it looks pretty the pi kvm is like a bizarre a little more chaos and maybe even some more action required to get what you want out of it but in the end you get more features and can get closer to exactly what you need and to head off any comments about the two projects relationship there seems to be some history between tiny pilot and pi kvm and i asked maxim about it he told me he was a little annoyed when tiny pilot's launch announcements didn't mention the fact that some of the video processing was from pi kvm's open source code but he's glad tiny pilot exists he said there's no conflict between him and michael and since users can choose between the two pi kvm solutions both aim to do better now i do a lot of work on cloud infrastructure where physical servers are managed for me so honestly my opinion of these devices doesn't hold much weight since i don't rely on kvms in my day-to-day work luckily i know someone who set up hundreds of kvms and remote desktop installations he's a radio engineer who's been in the industry for decades and one problem he constantly deals with is remote access in radio today there are computers everywhere computers and racks computers at tower sites and all around the office they all need to be managed and most don't have management apis or remote shells so kvm over ip is extremely useful so who's the engineer i've been talking about well it's my dad and i gave him both kvms a couple months ago and i told him that he could start using him and and test him out here but on the condition that i could interview him and ask him more about them and you know people watching this channel might not know but he's the one who taught me a lot about technology about computers and electronics got me into everything and i was actually digging for the oldest picture i could find of me using any technology and i happened to be using it looks like an old macintosh when i was maybe one or one and a half and i found this picture i'm wondering can you explain why you don't have a shirt on i believe i ran out of bed when i heard clicking on the keyboard on my work computer yeah so i mentioned in the video that remote access in radio is really common and you need to be able to to access a lot of computers remotely can you explain why you need that a lot of times for a radio station like this one well our radio stations are critical infrastructure places for the government and for the people who work and and and use radio so we try to hit some sort of standard like up time of 99 99.99 uh and we the famous five nines is what i always went for as a radio engineer and that means you get five or so minutes a whole year off that's why and the fact we don't have engineers in the building for most of the week we're either at transmitter sites or home sleeping or playing have an ability to get in remotely and access the critical machines is imperative so for for this radio station it's not just one station the station serves a ton of radio stations how many stations are there that this facility serves this facility serves about 43 stations transmitters all over the place and how many engineers are there to serve there are uh there's me and then there's a few guys that are stringer engineers who i appreciate very much so one full-time engineer so i i get why that's important to you in radio there's you know there's not a whole lot of engineers around yeah some of the places you've worked before have you deployed kvms there and have you used ipkvms yes we we did early the early kvm was a button switcher you could put four two four eight uh switches on one keyboard monitor and they were mainly to get you you know a rack full of computers but you only had room for one monitor and keyboard and mouse and then when they went to the ethernet version we could have uh stations on different levels of a building down the hall you could be at home vpn in and control a computer those were all critical times for us to get that access because there were so few of us and computers became more and more critical you know when the day i started computer like an apple ii was 16k of memory and then the pc came out a couple years after i started uh the ibm pc so we evolved from there to where every piece of audio people here except the actual live mics comes off of computers so i remember when i handed you the pi kvm you got to set up full integration with the computer setting up atx and all that were there any problems when you set that one up no okay yes there were and they were my own problems i have a rule like check it first check your wiring check your you know get that meter out uh but i didn't do that because it was during cardinal baseball and other things uh so i did hook uh two wires up incorrectly and it cost me about three hours of knowing that i hooked it up correctly uh you engineers and and techs out there you know what i'm talking about but uh once i got all the wires connected though in the right spots uh it worked perfectly it was a wonderful thing and for the tiny pilot was there anything when you were setting it up that you had issues with no the tiny pilot was a great plug and play experience like i plugged it in put it on the computer and it's been great every time i've gone to it it's there i've rebooted it i've powered it down suddenly i just you know kind of knocking it around it's been great it's plug and play device and so you you control a couple different machines like what are the two computers you're using on them on right now well the one computer is the one that sends uh radio data out so if you're driving around you see data on the car display uh that's that computer so that's critical to us because sometimes the site locks up in the computer and we can restart through that machine or sometimes the machine itself gets a windows update and decides to crash windows updates knocking out everybody including radio engineers and then the other one is the machine that covers this kind of stuff we have here which watches a lot of our audio signals the most critical ones it monitors them all the time and uh that one has uh silent sensing and alarms and emails and texting and stuff it all does out of that one machine and that's the one i put the box in to reboot it because we've got about four pieces of software working there and they work most of the time but sometimes they lock up and hard reboot when you need a reboot and you're at home it's uh it's a great thing to be able to hit that atx reset button now that you've used them for a couple weeks and use their web interfaces is there anything like did it work out of the box with everything or were there any browser issues well the browser is the first one that's be scared a lot of people and my shoes would be the one that comes up and says this is a bad piece of software do not go to this website it has a certificate i guess that you got to do the certificate magic which i am not an expert at uh but if you can in chrome and in safari i was able to get around the issue by saying go ahead anyway that was the first thing and then uh going into it like i tried on the on my phone phone experience is different than the desktop by a bit so nothing but nothing uh show stopping where you would just not do it you know or something that was so amazing that you had to have it so you could actually control the computer with your phone yes i could go in and i could do the shutdown restarts whatever just i don't recommend shutdowns unless you have the atx option so if you could only pick one if you wanted to deploy it to a few more computers if you only could pick one of the two which one would you pick and why would you pick that one over the other one well first of all i would pick either one like if there are there are computers there's there the one that is the plug and play uh that's tiny tiny pilot they had the tiny pot one plug and play great experience if i didn't want to atx and reset something i would be fine with that everywhere but if i had to choose one or the other i definitely would want to have that as an option and you could even mix and match them except then you have to figure out how to update two different devices and all that kind of stuff so probably if i had to do one it would be the the pi kvm because it has the atx interface ready to go extremely helpful if your computer locks up your station's off the air and a reboot will solve it another thing that i know a lot of people have talked about in other reviews of these devices independently is latency and how it it's definitely not fun moving your mouse and you know three seconds later it moves on the other computer so how is the latency on the two and are there any fun things that you figured out with well uh latency by the way is like the time we used to tell katie do something to the time she did it that would be latency also listen hang on the video so anyway their latency is interesting because the ability for them when you're at home and you're remoted in you have a latency from that and then the unit has a latency talking to the mouse uh the mouse is the biggest issue and you can click on the wrong thing if you're not careful right so i've never done that why i have done that i think we all have so but anyway but the latency you the thing was that you can improve it so if you don't run any kind of motion sensitive things you're not watching at security cameras for detail you can back off on some of the settings and then the latency is very good the mouse i could show you but the mouse sometimes it's like you loop and loop and then you wait and it's like then it starts looping and looping comes back you change the settings on the video frames rate or the quality of the jpeg video and it's following you pretty snappy so latency could be a problem but has an adjustment of both of them were ended up you could set them up really well at least for my purposes and you mentioned that you had a little networking mix up that you identified through the latency problems yeah so well the thing i had was uh i was uh frustrated because the pi kvm would only give me 720 and i had it on a screen that was 1080 and the screen would say 1080 and the uh the the web browser would say 720 and the resolution was 720 and so today i found out a uh i had it in a port 100 meg port and i plugged it into the one gig port and suddenly it's like flying and looks great so that's you know again hats off are there any other tips that you have if somebody's looking at one of these two um what what things do you think they should consider if they want that plug-and-play simplicity or if they need the atx what are some things that they should think about choosing you should think about security their security because these are computing devices and you're going to probably put them on your network you could vlan or do something and try to get it to where your port between the two networks is defined tightly if you have an i.t support person that's awesome or a company that you call for that kind of security but security is the first thing both of them run my idea would be to run it off of a usb port off the computer have it sit right behind the computer with a very short hdmi cable and uh use the uh cat cables for what they're good for when making long runs you know so so the tiny pilot is the best plug and play solution but it's a little more limited on the feature side and it costs quite a bit more especially if you want to unlock all its features with a subscription the pi kvm v3 costs less and has a much larger feature list but setup and ongoing maintenance are a little more involved both are great devices in their own right and which one you want really depends on your own needs tinypilot is available for sale either as a diy kit or as an all-in-one solution and currently pi kvm v3 is available on kickstarter or you can build your own version of it using the free guides and the documentation there are links to both projects below until next time i'm jeff gearling do we go out to the same time well yeah let's do it three three two one nope try again that seems odd what time is it it's 7 45 7 hours 45 minutes and 16 17 18. oh that's a different rate there so 30. yeah 30. there you go but back there you have rtl str right what is it rtl so you do you do have a raspberry pi over here that we didn't even do yeah without the fan you notice the lid nice and hot that's the fan look you got that case fan and that's have it cool temperature i keep watching it right there

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 254,443

Rating: 4.9494863 out of 5

Keywords: raspberry pi, pi-kvm, pi, kvm, tinypilot, voyager, diy, pi 4, model b, hat, hdmi, dvi, vga, keyboard, video, mouse, monitor, remote, control, display, browser, open source, tiny, pilot, software, ip, kvm over ip, ethernet, network, vpn, access, atx, power, reset, activity, led, monitoring, radio, station, rack, gear, engineer, joe, geerling, interview, dad, tech, latency, test, benchmark, assembly, review, tutorial, it, pc, mac, macos, windows, rdc, remote desktop, ipmi, redfish, server, hardware

Id: TIrkEr2AeDY

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021