I’ve been building out a homelab and trying to recycle a as many old/spare parts as I can. I picked up this Dell new-old-stock rack mount Console off of eBay, and as with most devices in this class, it supports VGA input only
All of the old motherboards I’m using have HDMI on them. I have HDMI->VGA working using this little converter:
…and as you can see from the first screenshot, it works great on direct connections. I wanted to reuse this old TESmart KVM switch
…and of course, as you can suspect, attaching the VGA adapter to the HDMI output on the switch doesn’t produce a video signal. I’m not sure if this little adapter transmits an EDID or how the TESmart deal with the whole monitor/switching logic. But for whatever reason, the machines can’t negotiate video signal with this KVM in the middle. Maybe the TESmart is trying to force out a 4K signal and not negotiating down?
I do still have a spare Level1Tech KVM, the older model with DisplayPort 1.2. I was considering getting a DisplayPort->VGA adapter to attach to that switch and try running DisplayPort into it, but I’m not sure if I’d run into the same issues.
Alternatively, I could get an old VGA rackmount KVM off eBay and just buy a few more HDMI->VGA adapters for each individual server.
What are the best options here?
