A tale of two Macs....
Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 7:45PM 
If you're a regular ScreenCastsOnline viewer, you might have seen this weeks episode "SCO0191 - Project: Mac Pro Update" in which I relate the tale of acquiring a second Mac Pro to add to my production rig. It was quite an intense process to put this show togther as it's probably only 40% screencast, the rest is narrative which I try to illustrate with graphics etc,. Takes a long time to put those type of shows together but based on the comments on the ScreenCastsOnline forum and via email, it seems to have been worth the effort!
One of the downsides of it taking so long to put together is that I had to skip one section on some of the utilities that make using the multiple monitor setup more effective. Since putting the show together, I've also had to make a slight change to the configuration.
I describe in the show using three monitors, one for each MP and one that is shared between both using a KVM switch. I originally wanted to use a single mouse and keyboard with the setup, and again, this was facilitated by the KVM. The problem was that the mouse (a Logitech MX revolution with Steermouse drivers) seemed to be misbehaving when shared via the KVM.
The problem was the the top mouse button along with the tilt wheel didn't work via the KVM. I also noticed that the mouse when switched to the left hand MP, occasionally froze. Not good.
Despite experimenting using the mouse USB dongle in several different ports in the KVM, I couldn't fix it.
The only option was to plug the USB dongle directly into the MP bypassing the KVM. This of course meant that I needed a second mouse for the 2nd Mac Pro, and brought into service my spare laptop mouse. The keyboard worked perfectly, so switching via the KVM allowed me to switch the central monitor and the keyboard.
After a days usage, it became apparent that the dual mouse configuration actually produced some benefits.
Each directly connected monitor is the main monitor for the connected machine and is intended to be on permanently so I can see the menu bar and the dock of each machine. If I want to use one machine and monitor something on the other, I can just make sure the app is viewable on the main screen on the "unswitched" machine and all is well. If previously I wanted to activate something on the "unswitched" machine, I had to manually switch across, click something, and switch back. Now I can just move to the second mouse and click.
Much simpler!
So I'm now glad the mouse didn't work properly via the KVM.
I'll blog about the utilities I use to enhance my usage of the multiple monitor setup tomorrow.
Reader Comments (3)
Just watched the screencast Don. I found the RAID part the most interesting. I was very surprised how easy it is to create and delete an array from inside OS X, and was especially impressed with the software you used (so impressed I've forgotten the name !)
Cheers
That would be SoftRaid!
Don,
Did you try Synergy by any chance? It lets you control mutiple PCs with one mouse/keyboard... but you can still have a mouse keyboard connected to those other computers if you want.
BOb