heat and noise / remote KVM access

[pocock]

For many European users in older buildings, there is no air conditioning.  Heat and noise from workstations can be a drain on productivity.

Can anybody comment on solutions for operating HDMI, keyboard and mouse over non-trivial distances, e.g. when hiding the workstation in another room with the door closed or even confining it to a basement or in-building data center?

For most Talos II and Blackbird users, I feel that there will be a particular interest in solutions to this problem that are secure and not dependent on proprietary technologies.

[madscientist159]

I tend to use fiber converters for this sort of thing -- you usually find them used to drive digital signage, remote projectors, etc.  The display converters tend to be "dumb" high speed media converters, but the USB converters are a bit more intelligent, and the USB 3.0 ones are not cheap.  That said, fiber means lightning protection (EMP proofing) comes along for free -- in the midwestern / southern US (and I think parts of the UK / France / Germany?) this is a fairly big deal.

All that said, I use a Blackbird, and I don't find it very loud or hot.  If you want more than the 4 core though and a lot of disks etc., I can understand the desire to locate the machine away from the desk.  Human operating tolerances are narrower than modern computing equipment tolerances. 

[ClassicHasClass]

Good to see you here (we conversed about this over E-mail).