I got a Blikvm (a clone of PiKVM) v1 CM4 unit from Aliexpress over a year ago. It's okay but I have been very disappointed with the Blikvm software. So I'm logging my experiences here.
Today I tried to fire up one of my computers I had set up about a year ago to launch from this system. Except that the
HDMI cable was not connected, so I have no idea what I was doing earlier. It was working but the video functionality
was being very flaky. then it tried to reboot the blikvm unit to no avail and i was seeing some unusual behavior of
i/o errors trying to run sudo or change the disk to rw mode.
I rebooted the Blikvm box by cycling its power, and it never came back up on its screen, SSH, or the web interface, so it would appear that it has bricked the sd card.
I suppose this lends credence to setting up these IP-KVM devices with more reliable storage than sd cards. I don't even trust eMMC on something like a CM4 (sorry, that would be, a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module), because I have another rather painful doorstop on my desk which is an Nvidia Jetson Xavier AGX unit! It's completely dead because it requires booting something off the eMMC before it can offload to NVMe. And clearly the eMMC is kaput. I was trying to look into what services might be able to swap the eMMC for me but I am pretty sure it might be deeply wedged under this thing's thermal solution. It's unlikely I'll have the bandwidth to reprosecute this item but suffice it to say I treat eMMC with the greatest suspicion going forward.
So far, I have started flashing a regular PiKVM sd card but then I just found this page which seems to indicate that there is a special image for PiKVM for the cm4 build on a chinese file hosting site. It's called pikvm-blikvm-cm4-20221127.zip. I'm going to flash and prepare an sd card with this as well before i test these out.
The official PiKVM image works super great on the Blikvm CM4 hardware. I am very happy about this, so I have 3 fully functional IP KVMs online (again) now. Since I don't expect to really have more than this amount of machines I'd want to actively fiddle with (the rest I can plan for getting automated via WoL etc), I don't need any more of these things.
Seems like one of my computers refuses to wake up properly from hitting the power button. i have to hit the reset button through the pikvm to get it to resume sleep properly. But it still does a regular shutdown when i hit the power button. I don't have regular buttons set up on the computer. So now I'm questioning if the software has mismapped pins for these buttons. This is a very unfun problem.