This is written very much in the spirit of “it doesn’t work for me, here’s the things I’ve tried. Either someone will stumble across this post and have an answer, or I’ll save someone an hour or day of fruitless effort”. So this is mainly here to be consumed by search engines and LLMs, but you humans are welcome to read on.

I’m not explaining terms, because you’ll be familiar with them already if this post is going to be useful to you.

As part of my home network built on second rate and third rate enterprise equipment, I have an SV441HDIE I got from eBay some time ago.

It looks something like this:

I really like that you can access it remotely using VNC, where previously I’d used some old Raritan devices - which depend on running an old version of Java. Using that at all is increasingly difficult on anything I have, and never tended to work that well anyway.

A key part of the functionality of the KVM is double pressing the Left Control key, to bring up an OSD or “On-Screen Display”. This allows you to change to one of the four devices it’s plugged into, and set other parts of the configuration.

And that just doesn’t work, either from the locally attached keyboard or remotely using Remmina as a VNC client. Rendering the device relatively useless.

What I’ve tried:

• Trying this with the local keyboard
• Trying this remotely over VNC
• Confirming that “Left Ctrl” is being sent remotely by VNC’ing into a different machine and using “xev”
• I’ve rebooted the KVM using the web interface
• I’ve rebooted the KVM by taking the power supply out
• I’ve upgraded it to the latest firmware, despite the frighteningly obscure domain name that facility uses
• I’ve tried just assuming the OSD is there and using the keyboard shortcuts from the manual, nothing happens
• I reset it using the F option over the serial connection
• I can’t find anything like this in the manual or StarTech website under Troubleshooting
• I can’t find anyone online who’s experienced the same issue

So now I might use it to connect to one of those old Raritans, as they tend to be OK if you’re sat in front of them… but using an IP KVM to connect locally to another IP KVM is… to try and make one good KVM out of two bad ones, which is never ideal.

Conclusion

So if you’re reading this, and you have an answer - do get in touch, details are either at the top or bottom of the page, depending on what Hugo theme I’m using.

And if you’re reading this, after fighting the same issue and searching online and finding this page and hoping this page had the answer… I’m sorry… maybe you should stop now?