Comment by space_ghost
6 hours ago
I did something similar last year with a monitor without built-in KVM but with good DCC support (Ultrasharp U3417W) and Synergy [0].
I use Synergy as part of my desk setup already, but needed a way to view the UI of a normally headless machine. The solution I built was a small shell script that terminated the active Synergy session and started a new one with a different config file (so keyboard/mouse input would map to the normally-headless machine), and fired off a DCC command to the monitor to change its input. The same script ran with a different argument would switch back to the normal display/control configuration. This solution worked pretty well until I was able to retire the headless machine early this year.
I loved synergy back in 2005 when it was _actually_ open source! It was probably my first open source contribution! But then it was enshittified and made impossible to build from source in order to support the commercial dreams.
does synergy works better now? 3 years ago, every week I would get into a situations where one machine was not connecting to the other, and I had to randomly restart synergy so maybe it connects. fun to do that 5 min before the meetings.
It's definitely very dependent on the stability of both machine's network.
I also recommend checking out the open source fork of Synergy, which is also compatible with Synergy clients https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow
ty, will look at deskflow