Loren Bandiera’s weblog

I bought a Belkin OmniView SOHO Series KVM Switch recently and I just got it today. I wanted to use it to run my Shuttle SN25P systems.

My monitor is a Dell 2000FP. I bought this particular KVM because it claims to support DVI and USB.

I unpacked and set it up seemed to be working fine at first, but things got ugly quickly. The first problem is that it doesn’t seem to see my cordless mouse. I could possibly workaround this by plugging into the USB hub on the switch.

However if there is nothing in the keyboard USB port the unit starts an annoying beeping. Reading some stuff online I see others have had this problem too. It seems Belkin has a firmware upgrade to fix this. It’s not available on their site so I guess they want you to call and beg for it.

The second problem is that despite their marketing claims to support resolutions up to 1600×1200, the reality is that it just doesn’t work. When using this KVM, my monitor gets a nasty flicker and the colors are way off (everything is red/green). The monitor works perfectly when directly connected to either system.

It’s only been a couple of hours with this KVM but I’m ready to just put the damn thing in the garbage. It’s completely worthless as far as I’m concerned. I should have done more research about this before I ordered it.

There doesn’t seem to be any KVM on the market today that actually supports DVI. I guess all the pollyanna vendors can only handle PS/2 connectors and lame ass analog VGA.

So since using a KVM is not going to be an option my only alternative is to manually switch cables as necessary.

I only need a keyboard to boot/restart my Windows box and I can run pretty much everything else via Terminal Services on my Linux box.

Not a great way to start the day.

I’m on-site for a client again today (I was here yesterday too). Not much to really say about that except it’s slowing down Sussen development.

I’ll have to do some hacking when I get home. I was on a bit of a roll with the reporting before this client work came up.

Still working on the reporting. I can generate about half of a report right now. I need to re-work some of the interpreter code to save more information about test results. Once I do that I’ll be able to generate a complete report.

Also I wrote some code today so I could validate the OVAL definitions XML. I’m using the XmlValidatingReader Class to do this.

try
{
	XmlValidatingReader vr = new XmlValidatingReader (reader);

	XmlSchemaCollection sc = new XmlSchemaCollection ();
	sc.Add("oval", @"oval-schema.xsd");
	sc.Add("redhat", @"redhat-schema.xsd");

	vr.Schemas.Add (sc);

	Logger.Log.Info ("Validating...");

	vr.ValidationEventHandler += new
		ValidationEventHandler (ValidateEventHandler);

	while (vr.Read())
	{
	}

}
catch (Exception e)
{
	Console.WriteLine (e.Message);
}

In theory the code should work but in practice I’m getting an XML Schema error about subtestAttributes. I’ll have to leave this code disabled until I resolve that.

YesterdayI didn’t get much done on Sussen due to on-site work I needed to do for a client.

Today I’m working on report generation. I’ve been reading the oval results schema and looking at sample reports. I’ve got some initial code written but it’s still early in the process.

Should have more of an update later on today.

I’ve got all the RedHat tests executing! It’s a first cut at it so the code is kind of messy. Just like the parser, I’ll start to cleanup and optimize as I go forward.

Next steps would be to figure out how I’m going to handle tests for other systems (Windows, Debian, etc.) . I also want to get hacking on report generation.

Right now, I’m going to watch the The Contender. Can’t work all the time!

Still working on getting all the tests excuting. I’ve got a couple working. Right now I’m working on the RpmVersionCompare test and I’m having problems trying to parse a string like 1.0.0 into a floating point number.

I was hoping to have all these up and running so I could start on generating reports but it’s taking longer than I thought it would. I’m working on it…

Working on getting the rest of the OVAL tests executing. I had the PermissionTest working before I got caught up re-writing the parser.

I’m working on the File and Uname tests right now. The Mono.Unix namespace is big help here.

One thing I’m not sure about is the InetListeningServersTest and ProcessTest. I know today Mono doesn’t have the ability to query other running processes (unless it created them). Might have to write some wrappers around netstat and ps.