What I found seems to indicate that Jet fixed those two issues in a hardware revision but it’s really difficult to distinguish the new on from the old as they’ve seemingly kept the same name and not added a v2 or something like that to the naming. One of their vendors has a Poe va non poe sku, the other has a an emmc vs tf card sku. All seemingly without a name distinguishing them.
There’s also just chaos on Amazon as they are being sold in at least 4 separate listings with no name distinguishing which model is which, non of them mention poe and all claim full size hdmi.
In any case I thought you should know that your write up is out of date here but you probably need to do some digging to figure it out.
KVM switches are relatively cheap[^1] so I'm surprised there isn't an integrated solution.
[^1]: e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Switches-Supports-switching...
[1] https://technotim.com/posts/pikvm-at-scale/
Do you know which one of these works well with that?
I want to be able to have power toggle on my Mac remotely, but without soldering in a jumper on the power button, AFAIK there's no way to do it :(
Nearly thirty years ago when I used to work on Silicon Graphics kit everything from powering on and off a server to installing the OS from scratch over the network could be done out of band via serial - and automatically, using expect(1)
That’s progress, I guess.
But, the devices here are geared towards people using consumer products as servers (which I do at home, not critizing), and serial console during early boot is not an option on those, and most boards don't even have a serial port anymore.
I will say, if you're presenting a usb keyboard, you might also be able to present usb storage which could be nice for booting off of.
If you want to plug into a system that isn't server class, then they should be producing a video card that hooks into the USB bus, the always on rail of the power supply, the power switch pin of the power supply, and has an RJ45 jack. The contents of the card should be an off the shelf BMC chip.
But realistically if you want this kind of functionality, just buy server class systems that come with it.
Jeff Geerling rocks
So, sure, nerd out and add more hardware to your rack, but I need a physical keyboard and mouse attached to a machine in my rack like once per year.
Admittedly, I haven't looked at any open-sourced firmwares either which could have improved things.
I have found the Sispeed USB KVM very useful, the convenience is well worth the $50 it cost me. The UX isn't great but you don't really need it to be. It works (most of the time) via WebUSB for the keyboard mouse.
I will say iDRAC has been a lot more reliable for me, but the chance I'll ever buy a Dell server for home use is basically 0.
Most employ heavy compression by default, and it looks a little more pronounced with motion. A few have 'high quality' mode, but especially on the Pi-based KVMs this eats up more CPU, so I don't use that.
It's on the whole best for use cases where you just need to log into remote servers and check on things, or reinstall/re-image something. I don't think I'd like using any of these for a constant remote session for daily work. I do use Screen Sharing on macOS for that sometimes, and it works great in its low-latency mode. None of the KVMs I've tested are quite to that level.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/re...
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/03/researchers-disclos...
I bought a SiPeed NanoKVM. It caught fire 15 minutes after being plugged in. Despite providing pictures of the charred PCB, they insisted I ship it back, costing me €20, and then tried 3 times during the transit to get AliExpress to void my return as fraudulent. I eventually provided proof of signed delivery to their people on the last possible day of my final appeal, and AliExpress ruled in my favor, refunding my purchase price but not the return shipping cost. Better some money back than none at all!
Maybe just buy the JetKVM. It looks nice!
How/why? The AI needs to navigate the BIOS among other tasks - so we need a KVM to send arrow down and enter, roughly speaking.
We were a GL.iNet KVM shop until we ran into a nasty issue with a specific ThinkPad - the GL.iNet would send an incorrect USB 0 byte which most laptops ignored, except this ThinkPad which was freaked out by it / beeped / wouldn't accept any key command.
I couldn't let this problem go, so I got a low level USB debugger [0] (which I extremely recommend) and wire-debugged the USB signal, A/B comparing the GL.iNet and the PiKVM. The PiKVM was doing things properly (usb-wise), so we swapped all (~10) of our KVMs for it.
I also remember that the GL.iNet was stranger/more difficult to customize (it's just running pikvm the software but doesn't let you customize it as much). The GL offers a nicer UI, but it doesn't matter that much (we drive it via API) and we're happy to support the actual PiKVM authors/company. It's a fantastic product. Not cheap, but truly truly great.
P.S. If someone from GL wants to reach out, I can offer you a lot of low-level debugging info -- fixing this issue would be great.
[0] https://greatscottgadgets.com/cynthion/
They also have a nice (if messy) solution for multiple device management with an external box (TechnoTim had some good coverage on his channel/website[1]).
Most other Pi-based KVMs use PiKVM's software anyway, and I'm not sure if any directly support PiKVM upstream (they should, IMO).
The other class is the JetKVM and its derivatives (many forked JetKVM's snappier Go software), and that's another reason I've stuck with JetKVM itself. It seems to have a nice community around it for mounts in almost any situation, and hacks to get weird things working correctly with it. They're also going to have a PoE + full-size HDMI version soon, I think, with microSD for expanded ISO storage.
[1] https://technotim.com/posts/pikvm-at-scale/