Synergy

As security administrators, we often find ourselves installing multiple OS platforms just to be able to use particular tools. For example, UNIX provides a few best-of-breed security tools not available on Windows, and Windows hosts wide-ranging business tools in Microsoft Office not available on native Linux. You can find many solutions that let you take software based on one platform and run it on a different platform. For example, emulation products such as Cygwin (a Windows-based environment for running particular Linux applications) or virtual machine (VM) software such as

VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server let you essentially build multiple separate computers on one physical host. Sometimes, however, you want the speed, compatibility, or redundancy of running various platforms on physically separate computers. In this situation, a useful tool called Synergy can help you control multiple computers and monitors from a single keyboard and mouse.

How Synergy Works
A traditional KVM switch requires a keystroke or activation of a physical switch to shift keyboard and mouse input and video from one computer to another. Similar in concept, the Synergy software lets you share a keyboard and mouse among two or more computer systems and monitors. However, Synergy requires that each computer be connected to its own monitor. What this means is that you can place your Windows laptop beside the monitor connected to your Linux or Macintosh (or another Windows) computer, start the Synergy software, and control both systems with just one keyboard and mouse. You simply drag your mouse from one monitor to the other and the keyboard input switches to the other computer. This setup can be very efficient for security administrators who run predominately UNIX systems but also need to keep an eye on Microsoft Outlook running on a Windows system or perform Windows administrative tasks.

Synergy is a client/server tool that basically works like this: The computer whose keyboard and mouse you’ll use acts as the primary computer, or server. Synergy uses the TCP/IP network to send the keyboard/mouse commands entered at that primary computer to the secondary computer, or client.

Synergy does a remarkable job of capturing the keyboard and mouse input—sometimes you even forget that you’re using multiple platforms. You can share clipboards between your server and client, and even across different platforms. For example, you could copy text from Safari on a Mac and paste it into an Outlook email message on a Windows machine. Let’s walk through how to download and install Synergy on the client and server, edit a configuration file, and start the service.

Installing Synergy
Download Synergy at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net. The latest version (1.3.1), runs on Windows 95 and later, Mac OS X 10.2 and later, and most versions of UNIX that run X Window version 11 revision 4 or later. Extract the latest version of Synergy to each of the systems you wish to control. On the Windows platform, run the program SynergyInstaller-1.3.1.exe to install the application. On UNIX systems, you’ll edit a configuration file contained in the extracted Synergy package. Although Synergy works as a client/server application, you actually install the same package on each computer. The computer with the keyboard and mouse physically connected will be your server and all other systems will be clients. (Synergy refers to the server and client computers as “screens.”) Next, we’ll define the physical relationships between these screens.

Configuring a Windows Server
After you’ve installed Synergy on each computer that you wish to control, you need to configure it. I’ll first describe how to configure Synergy for a Windows server screen, then for a UNIX server screen, and finally for client screens.

On a Windows-based server, click Start, All Programs, Synergy to launch the Synergy program. Click Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server). Next, in the Screens & Links dialog box, click Configure and add each of the computers, or screens, you wish to share. At a minimum, you must use two screens—the server and a client—but you can add multiple clients if you physically have the computers. Click the plus (+) button and enter your server computer’s host name in the Screen Name text field. Click the + button again and enter the host name of the computer that you want to share the server’s keyboard and mouse—this will be your client. As aliases, you can enter alternate names of the computers; for example, you could enter the NetBIOS name as the screen name and then enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the computer, or even an IP address, as an alias.

Next, specify the physical relationship, or link, between the computers. The configuration fields for links might be confusing at first. Think about how your computer monitor screens are placed in relation to each other, not from your point of view as you face the computers. If your server computer is physically situated to your client computer’s right, you would configure the relationship like this:

0 to 100% of the left of
serverMachine goes to
0 to 100% of clientMachine

then click Links + to add the link. This configuration means that if you drag your mouse across any portion (0 to 100 percent) of the left edge of the server’s screen, Synergy will transfer keyboard and mouse control to the client computer.

It’s important that you also define a reciprocal link to return the mouse and keyboard control to the server. Enter

0 to 100% of the right of
clientMachine goes to
0 to 100% of serverMachine

and click Links + to add the reciprocal link.

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