Leopard and Belkin OmniView KVM kernel panics

[weckart]

I tried to upgrade my brother's MacMini PPC yesterday, which shares a display and keyboard with a generic PC. This worked fine under Tiger. For safety's sake, I cloned the PPC HD to an external FW drive, hooked this back up to the Mini and installed a Leopard upgrade over this to test for stability, since he has some shareware apps installed.

On first reboot, I got a KP but thought nothing of this and restarted. All seemed fine. This morning, I restarted from the FW drive and it KPed as soon as the swirls appeared. It KPed too quickly for a crash log to be written, unless somebody knows how to extract one from Open Firmware, but the crash last night did get written to Logs and put the blame on USB. The KVM is the only thing directly plugged into the USB port.

It KPs consistently at the same point in the boot up sequence. As my brother has another KVM he has been too lazy to set up so far, hopefully this will solve the problem. The FW installation is fine, as I plugged this into a spare Mini with the same specs without KVM and it booted up fine.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Fwiw...

I have always had some problem with the Belkin Omniview products. Always.

I switched to the Avocent AutoView series and haven't looked back.

My problems started with systems, usually servers, detedting that the keyboard and mouse 'disappear' resulting in loss of control. We're talking Windoze servers here. I had to warm reboot several servers in my days with the OmniView KVM's and I'm sure that a few grey hairs are the result of having to do that.

The AutoView and SwithView products just work.

Check out this product which supports 2 computers.

On that page they actually show a MBP keyboard for the background in their 'online solution selector'. Viral marketing?

I don't work for Avocent I have just been burned by the OmniView several times in the past... I have anough problems with our users to add hardware issues.

 

[weckart]

Yup, I'm aware that the Belkin enjoys a patchy reputation at best. However, the OmniView in question seems to have behaved more or less reasonably until the upgrade. As said, my brother already had a better KVM, which he had not got around to unpacking.

Fair to say also, that Belkin makes a better fist than most in keeping prices down, and that DVI KVMS are hard to come by.

Shame about the OmniView, as that company usually makes more than the average effort to support Mac users.