Half a KVM stopped taking keystrokes, and the fix is a new KVM

A remote console that still shows video is a console that will still be trusted, which is the whole problem here.

On 20260918, after a routine restart, one entire bank of Node0’s central KVM switch, eight of its sixteen ports, stopped delivering keyboard input to the machines behind it. Video switching kept working on every port, so the unit looked fine from the only angle most people check. Three of the affected hosts had been logging USB errors for days before the restart, which suggests the bank had been dying for a while and the restart finished it. Two more restarts changed nothing.

What that costs is specific: eight machines, three of them among the fleet’s largest compute servers, now have a console you can watch but cannot type into. The one situation a remote console exists for, a host that has hung before the network comes up and needs a key pressed, is exactly the situation this unit can no longer serve for those ports.

The verification technique is the transferable part, and it is what caught the fault: type into the target and read the input device on the other end, rather than trusting the screen. Picture and keystrokes travel different paths inside these units and either can fail alone.

The remedy for now is a workaround, while the replacement itself waits on funds. Christoph’s verdict is that this brand and model is not fit for the role and will be replaced when funds allow. Until then, hosts that genuinely need interactive recovery are moved to ports on the working bank, one spare port is held for a manual bypass by plugging the remote head directly into a target, and the rest are documented as having no keyboard-level recovery path. The fault is still open.