Mac (Under) the Knife: Remote Control

This blog post references my cover story, 'Mac (Under) the Knife: Piecing Together the PowerPC Puzzle' in the September 15, 2005 edition of EDN.

Simultaneously running benchmarks on four Mac systems, on top of the two Windows systems already in the office, would normally require a ridiculous number of keyboard, mice, and displays. Two cross-platform options, one hardware-based and the other software-centric, enable you to slim down the number of peripherals you'll need to squeeze onto your desk. A KVM (keyboard, video, and mouse) switch enables multiple computers to share one keyboard, mouse, and display; some KVMs also enable you to multiplex multiple systems' audio signals. Make sure your KVM supports the video interfaces your systems and display require, as well as appropriate keyboard and mouse interfaces; Belkin's two- and four-port KVMs, for example, happily handled the Macs' DVI outputs. Pairing a Mac with a Windows keyboard isn't an optimum configuration, but it's still very doable.

If all of your systems are Macs, Apple's Remote Desktop utility provides a solid software approach to peripheral sharing. If all of the systems you want to control are Windows XP Professional systems, on the other hand, Microsoft's Remote Desktop software will fit the bill; the company even offers a Mac client program. But in our case, we wanted to run multiple Macs from a Windows XP Home-based laptop, so we turned to the RealVNC client in combination with Redstone Software's OSXvnc server software. The combination ended up being rock-solid. One downside to this approach is the incremental system load that the VNC server software causes, but our analysis suggested that the performance hit was miniscule. We were even able to control the Mac systems from outside our LAN, which came in handy when multi-day benchmark sessions conflicted with out-of-office demands.