Controlling 4 PC’s in home server rack.
- @david
Hi there. I found TinyPilot online while searching for a solution that would be able to remotely control and view 4x bare metal 1L PC’s at a full bios/boot visibility level. I have these going into my home server rack - they are based in the rack along with my router, switches, NAS etc and are running various OS’s and apps either bare metal, Docker, or in ProxMox VM.
Functionally it seems absolutely perfect apart from the minor issue that if I have 4 PC’s I want to manage, I need 4 TinyPilots. At $500 for the PoE version that’s a chunk of change.
In a perfect world I would be able to remotely view and interact with any of the 4 PC’s from my office 20 metres away on the other side of the house, almost entirely for diagnostic and config purposes. Once up and running the need to connect will be less often as e.g. HomeAssistant’s main interaction is via browser interface.
Are there any simple ways to achieve what I want without having to buy 4 seperate units? Or is that just the reality of the situation?
David @david2023-06-08 11:28:04.734ZHi @BlackrazorNZ, thanks for your question!
A number of TinyPilot users 'chain' their TinyPilot with a KVM switch to manage multiple target machines. You normally connect a keyboard, display, and a mouse to the KVM switch alongside multiple PCs. Then you switch between different PCs as needed - using either a physical switch on the KVM, or remotely by using a key combination for 'hot-key switching'.
In this case, a TinyPilot will connect to the KVM switch instead of the normal peripherals. That way, you get the remote capabilities of TinyPilot alongside the ability to switch between your separate PCs.
We maintain a user-contributed wiki of compatible KVM switches (I suspect in your case you'd want a 4 device switch). But I'll note that we can't guarantee compatibility with any KVM switch or their hot-key switching functionality.
Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions.