I had the same issue with this device. I ended up writing some code that you could run on a machine to operate the switching via the RS232 port: https://github.com/timgws/kvm-switch/
Bonus for adding 'glide and switch' functionality, so you can move the mouse to the edge of the screen and it would jump the input to the next display in your layout. It's like a hardware version of Synergy.
Very finicky device, but if you don't touch it - and you don't use any of the shortcuts - it works.
PIDs from Windows are not exposed when looking at /proc, so I am guessing you will not be able to `kill -9 explorer.exe` unless there is some real voodoo going on (and then it would not be POSIX compatible, anyways).
I think the command that you meant to say was killall :) `kill` will only kill pids, not process names.
A quick Google search shows that most commercial usenet providers do not have more then 3000 days worth of text retention. (ie, you can get a little more then 8 years worth of history).
So, unless someone out there has terabytes worth of text storage from way back when (which is one reason why Google bought Deja News in the first place), I don't think it will be possible to get all that history.
Another commenter posted that the L1Techs KVM are Rextron devices. The Startech switches are rebranded ConnectPro KVMs.