Spacemouse ownership changes after using KVM switch.

[skrampach]

I have a user on an AIX box with a KVM switch to his windows system. The spacepro mouse when initially launched works great however, when the user toggles the KVM from AIX/Unix to windows, the /etc/inittab relaunches process ownership of the daemon of /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv from the users ID (such as 1079) to root (ID 0). When the user toggles the KVM back from Windows to AIX/Unix, the PID never changes from root back to the users ID, nor can he kill the process to restart the daemon as it is now owned by root.

The /etc/inittab contains the standard "3d:234:respawn:/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb </dev>/dev/null 2>&1" and we tried the original version aix5-v1-2-17 and the newest aix5-v1-4-0

Any ideas?

[UtaSH]

Hi skrampach,

this is how the Unix driver works when started from /etc/inittab:

The init process starts the driver (3dxsrv) and the first thing is to look for a device. If it finds a device it then looks for the logged in user and switches it's ID to this user. In case the driver does not find a device it sleeps for 10 minutes to prevent a "process respawning too fast" error from the init process. In this state the process' owner is root. After 10 minutes the process stops and init will restart it. So if the user would wait for 10 minutes he should see the driver panel again.

The 10 minutes initially were implemented for machines where no device is attached. Of course this is not an acceptable time for your user to wait. Thus we have an option to reduce this time.

Please add to the line in the /etc/inittab the option -delay and a number. The number times 10 is the time in seconds that the driver waits until it stops. Example:

• 3d:2345:respawn:/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb -delay 2 </dev>/dev/null 2>&1

This would make the driver stop after 20 sec and then restart. Every 20 sec until it finds a device. If this is acceptable for you then I would recommend to adapt the line in the /etc/inittab accordingly.

That means when the user switches the KVM back to AIX he has to wait - worst case - 20 sec until the driver panel is back. My suggestion is just theory; I have no experience with KVM switches and our 3D mice. Please try it and post your findings here. Thanks!