Black Box KV812A manual Operation, Sending Commands from the PS/2 Keyboard Optional, USB Plus Only

CHAPTER 5: Operation

5.4 Sending Commands from the PS/2 Keyboard (Optional, USB Plus Only)

You can control many functions on the ServSwitch USB Plus—such as CPU- channel selection, autoscanning, or disabling video—from an attached PS/2 keyboard, using commands triggered with the Switch’s currently selected hotkey combination. All of the hotkey-control commands are invoked by holding down the one or two hotkeys and then pressing a command key. By default, the two hotkeys are [Ctrl] and [Alt], although other keystroke combinations can be selected (see Section 3.4). (The Switch cannot recognize commands from USB keyboards, because hardware and software have not yet become advanced enough for a switch to be able to isolate and absorb individual keyboard characters from a USB data stream on the fly.)

Normally, when you send a hotkey command, you have to release the hotkeys and the command key before you can send another one. The one exception to this rule is {Hotkeys} + [Tab], the “switch to next CPU channel” command; you can “tab through” the channels by holding down the hotkeys and repeatedly pressing [Tab].

It is particularly easy to enter commands with extended keyboards on which additional keys can be programmed to act as combinations of other keys. PS/2- interface versions of such keyboards are supplied with many Gateway™ computers. If you program one of these “spare” keys to produce both hotkey keystrokes, or if you program a set of these keys to produce the hotkey and channel-number keystrokes, you’ll be able to select channels and do other things with as few as one or two keypresses.

The hotkey commands are summarized below. Note that to generate the numeric digits in the commands that contain them, you need to press the number keys on the top row of the main section of the keyboard, not the number keys on the keypad; the Switch will not recognize keypad numbers.

•Use {Hotkeys} + [x], where x is either one or two (on the 2-port models) or a number from one to four (on the 4-port models), to switch to the corresponding CPU channel. If you try to select a channel with a higher number than the Switch has ports, the Switch will ignore the command and pass it through to the currently selected computer.

•Use {Hotkeys} + [Tab] to switch to the next higher-numbered channel. This channel can either be the next in sequence or the next active channel, depending on how the Switch is configured (see Section 3.3).

31