X

Synergy is a great and free way to replace a KVM switch (kind of). It doesn't do video, but it does keyboard and mouse control across multiple networked workstations awesomely.

I was having issues with high CPU utilization on Mac OS X with Synergy. I am using Ubuntu 11.04 as the Synergy server and Mac OS X as the client.

The Synergy project has gone through some changes over the last year or so. It was forked a while back to a new project called Synergy-Plus. But now things have come back together and the projects have merged to be one again. This is generally a good thing and one of the reasons why open source is so great.

A fork is sometimes subversive (heck maybe all the time), but it also allows the project and the technology to continue to grow and mature, even if the original project isn't on board with the changes. In the best case scenario, everyone can literally patch up their differences and merge a fork of a project back with the original and keep the ball rolling full steam ahead.

I had a mix of older Synergy Plus versions going between Ubuntu and OS X. I was noticing a huge load on my Mac CPU just by moving my mouse around in circles.

Synergy is normally a very low overhead app. This was not normal at all. So I upgraded all of my workstations to the latest version (1.44 beta). It is not available in the Ubuntu repos so I had to download and install the .deb manually.

Once I got everything on the same and newest version, OS X zips along like usual. Synergy is one of my most favorite applications. I use it every day at work, and frankly could not do my job without it. Go check it out!

Update:

I ran into a weird problem with 1.4.4. Double-clicking on Mac OS X stopped working. So I dropped back to version 1.3.5 which is referenced in the bug report and both my CPU and my double-clicking are happy now :).

So I've been working on getting all the Mac Workstations setup to use ARD at the college that I work for. I ran ARD on our Xserve to search for and capture all the Macs in one of our labs. But since then I haven't been able to remote into the Xserve. I keep on getting the following error.

An administration application is currently running on this computer and will not allow you to remotely control the screen

Well that stinks! Now I have to go way up to the computer room and see what is going on. Or do I? Heck no! I figured that the "administration application" that was currently running must have been ARD. So I can just kill it from the command line. So I ssh'd into the server and ran:

ps aux |grep Remote

That lists anything running with the word Remote in it. ARD is listed as "Remote Desktop". So I copied its PID number and ran:

kill -9 [PID of Remote Desktop]

Then I could once again remote control the Xserve from my desktop. However I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have to go through this all again. So I started poking through the preferences of ARD. Under "Security" I found a check box called "Allow control of this computer when this application is running". I checked it and now I can remote into the Xserve just fine again.

I love ssh!