So, what I would like to do in general is redirect my keyboard and mouse to a different system in order to control it. Some caveats: my local system does not have X installed while the remote system does, the systems are on the same network, SSH is installed on both systems, and the local system is a laptop.

What I am trying to do specifically. I read an article once where someone installed ESXi on their local system, set up a guest, redirected their video card and the USB ports for their mouse/keyboard to the guest, and used this as a client hypervisor. The author noted that this worked far better than expected. I'd like to do the same . . . but I'm on a laptop. I managed to get ESXi installed, set up a guest, passed the graphics card through to the guest, and had a working system. However, since this is a laptop, my keyboard and touchpad were still connected to the hypervisor. From what I can tell, my mouse and keyboard aren't listed as devices that are available for passthrough using ESXi's mechanisms. Is there a way to somehow tunnel my mouse and keyboard through to the guest system, perhaps using SSH? I mean . . . there HAS to be a way, I'd figure, but I'm not sure how to approach the problem.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

I used to use a program called synergy to do something similar, it is used to use a single keyboard/mouse over multiple machines on the same network, moving the mouse off of the right edge of one screen ( for instance ) would make it appear on the left edge of a different machines screen, the config is a little tricky, but is well documented, you need to install synergy on all machines you want to control, unfortunately I haven't used it in a number of years so don't have any example configs I can post.

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I remember using Synergy, too. However, I don't think it will do what I'm wanting. First, I doubt I could install it on ESXi - it's Linux-ish, but it's a very customized kernel. I'm looking for a way to do passthrough at a hardware level, perhaps by sending /dev/tty over SSH. I don't know if that will work, though...