Holy smoke. In this case I almost wish I had not searched the forums first. But, here goes:
I already have a PC in my office closet (along with the cable modem & router). Cat5 runs all over the house, including to a hub on the desk that goes to my wife's PC, the printer, and any other gizmo that I need to bring home from work. I typically use a wireless laptop & VNC to the closet PC when I need to.
The PC is already quiet, it's mostly in the closet to reduce the amount of clutter on my desk. I was thinking of posting something about how I silenced the PC and solved the closet heat problem. Then I read this thread.
Lately I've been thinking it would be nice to have a 'real' connection to the PC sometimes. Some quick numbers suggested that it should be cake to get KVM signals across a dedicated Cat5 UTP cable. Google came up with these:
http://www.magenta-research.com/products/products/product_set2/MultiViewPC.html
http://www.networktechinc.com/cat5.html
http://www.minicom.com/kvm_smartext.htm
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/EXT-CAT5-2000.htm
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Product_Id=87618#
etc.
All very cool. Note that some claim to maintain 1920 x 1200 x 75 resolution video, which is way more than I would need.
But they're really freakin' expensive! Probably because they're purchased mostly by companies. I bet it won't be long before there are enough SOHOs & homes with enough computers that something like this will start to get cheap. And when it does, I'm all over it. The ideal solution, to me, would have a KVM switch on the reciever. That way I could use the head from my wife's PC on the closet PC.
Anyone have experience with these things? Anyone have better luck finding one that isn't so damned expensive? Anyone else think that the future is hardware in the closet with heads (could be a monitor & kbd, could be a home theater, could be a phone, could be a garage door opener) all over the house?
Finally, I've gotta chime in on the is-this-topic-valid debate: I've read (and enjoyed) other threads about putting storage|PSUs|servers in the basement|closet|WC that didn't get slammed. We should at least be consistent. Search the forums and go slam those threads, too.