Re:Server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often
by arcticgeek on Sunday January 15, 2023 @04:27AM
(#34388062)
I‘ve really only had experience with Supermicro BMCs but I totally believe you that there are lots of crufty OOB environments in the wild which are hard to work with. While it’s true that applets don’t work anymore (probably a good thing), and therefore the experience isn‘t as integrated or seemless as it once was, it’s a practical matter to just log into the BMC and click on the console preview, using the JNLP file to launch the console via OpenWebStart as an independent application outside of the browser. One other thing is that the self signed certs from these older implementations are often expired and therefore throw an extra warning or two when you launch these interfaces, but you just click through them and carry on.
Re:Server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often
by ixs on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @05:14PM
(#34420200)
For fun: This actually runs the Java Applet KVM viewer on a SuperMicro X7 board: https://github.com/ixs/kvm-cli/blob/master/kvm_x7.py
1. Downloads the data from the IPMI interface
2. Modifies the files to run locally
3. Writes out a Java configuration with weak security settings so that TLS works with the deprecated ciphers.
4. Fires off a socat instance to redirect the localhost ports to the remote IPMI device.
5. Starts appletviewer locally.
Great fun writing that. Thank god we decomissioned the last X7 based storage appliances a while ago...
I've seen multiple vendors with problematic code that didn't work with newer Java versions.
This is by no means meant to bash Java. Some non-Java BMCs can be horrible as well (e.g. require many TCP ports in a firewall/tunnel unfriendly way or require SSH with old algorithms that are no longer enabled by default, or telnet..)