Control Multiple Computers with Single Keyboard and Mouse
When you have more than 1 computer, it starts to get messy because of the amount of wires and also keyboards and mouse. Normally we have a set of keyboard and mouse for 1 computer and if we were to share it with another computer, there is a small switch box called KVM switch where you can control where you want the keyboard and mouse to be active on which computer. Even KVM uses a lot of wires because you need one input for mouse and keyboard and two outputs or probably more if you want to share it with more computers. Wireless KVM is still not very common and its expensive.
You can try to use Input Director where you can share a single keyboard and mouse with multiple computers. The only drawback is you must have the master computer that the physical keyboard and mouse is attached to turned on and it must have a working network. You switch which system receives the input either by hotkey or by moving the cursor so that it transitions from one screen to the other (in a very similar fashion to a multi-monitor setup). The idea being that you can position the monitors from two or more systems in a row and use a shared keyboard/mouse to control all of them. Input Director also supports a “shared” clipboard, in which you can copy data onto the clipboard on one system, transition across to another and paste.
Input Director is easy to install and configuration merely takes a few minutes. You have to install Input Director on the master computer that has keyboard and mouse attached and also the slave computers. Antivirus or Firewall application can possibly block Input Director from working properly, so make sure you add it to the exclusion list.
Fing Discovers all Devices Connected to Network
If you are a network administrator that manages a network that has many users connects to, it is your job to scan the network once in a while to check for any abnormal devices connected or even service that are not supposed to be running on the network and one example is running multiple DHCP servers can cause IP conflicts. However you can’t be going from computer to computer to check on the users that has illegally plugged in any unauthorized devices to the network or running conflicting services.
Before settling for anything else, you should give Fing a try. Fing is the ultimate command line tool for network and service discovery. Taking advantage of a brand new cross-platform network engine, it reaches an impressive discovery sharpness and speed. You’re going to discover your whole network in few seconds and generate customized real-time reports.
Fing Features:
* Network discovery with 100% hit in any ethernet-based network
* Supported operating systems: Linux, Mac OS, Windows
* MAC address gathering
* Faster and smarter than Look@LAN
Because this tool is a command line based, you will need to learn the available options and switches for Fing from the online manual. The easier way is just launch the interactive mode which allows you to skip reading a long usage manual and start using Fing immediately. The interactive mode will guide you through the available features and configurations using the question and answer method. The command to activate the interactive mode is by appending a –interactive at the end after Fing.exe.
Fing is freeware, and may be downloaded at the link below. There is a Windows installer that is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, and also linux with RPM, DEB and TGZ package, and a Mac OSX installer that is compatible with even compatible with Snow Leapord