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I have a Tyan S5533 motherboard which serves as my NAS drive. It has a dedicated IPMI NIC, but I cannot start up the Java console since Firefox 52, Chrome/Chromium no longer support NPAPI plugins.

I even tried the Firefox ESR, but that didn't work either. I read on ServerFault that IcedTea doesn't work with IPMI, so I replaced IcedTea with an Oracle JRE on my Arch Linux desktop.

Here is what I would like to know:

  • How to get the IPMI Java console working -- is there any browser that I can install on Arch Linux?
  • Since Firefox ESR will also only be supported until early 2018, what can be done to use the IPMI Java consoles? I have heard that Supermicro is moving towards HTML5 based KVM consoles, but what about existing boards out there? Will they all get a firmware update to support non-Java-based consoles?
JonathanDavidArndt
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Inxsible
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  • Are they using applet or webstart. An applet might be possible with appletviewer control. A webstart console can directly use a jnlp Handler without special plugin support (or you can launch javaws executable with the JNLP URL). Besides that often those consoles also open a pure VNC port which you can use with a native client. – eckes Aug 07 '17 at 21:24
  • it downloads a jnlp file, so it's definitely webstart. – Inxsible Aug 08 '17 at 00:50

4 Answers4

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Try javaws <jnlp-URL>. This runs Java plugins outside of the browser.

https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_webstart.xml. Also, look if you vendor offers other tools to work with this.

Sven
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  • This works with HP ILO, too. After logging into to ipmi page simply click on jnlp url, if firefox asks what to do with it, point it to javaws and remember selection. –  Aug 07 '17 at 19:45
  • this is the same as downloading the jnlp first and then executing the `javaws xx.jnlp` So it didn't work until I had downgraded java as listed in my answer below. – Inxsible Aug 08 '17 at 13:38
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I finally got the console working. I was using JRE8 which just wouldn't play ball with the jnlp file. It kept giving me FailedDownloadException with a nested exception of SSLHandshakeException as the reason. I even added my IPMI IP address in the exception site list in the java config. No dice !!

I finally downgraded my Java to JRE7u80. I still had to add my IPMI IP to the exception site list, but this time after warning me that running the program could be risky, it still ran it after I confirmed.

So, bottom line, downgrading Java worked.

As for whether KVM consoles will be supported in the future by the browsers :

  • The newer boards may get better firmware which support KVM consoles via HTML5 or such
  • If existing boards do get firmware updates KVM via HTML5, it is my opinion that this will mostly be for high end server boards and not all manufacturers may do this
  • You can continue using JNLP/Web Start. It's just that you won't be able to use the browser plugin. You can still download the *.jnlp file and then manually run Java Web Start

UPDATE: Oracle has removed support for Web Start. I tried using icedtea-web which uses openjdk, but at least for me, the jnlp file never starts the console. I keep getting SSLHandshakeException or a Main Class not found exception. I tried downgrading java all the way from jdk11-jdk6 and I couldn't find the javaws binary in any of the packages. Since icedtea/openjdk doesn't work, my only option is to use ipmiview -- since both my boards are SuperMicro.

Inxsible
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I use firefox 51 plus java plugin. It is common rule to pack files as chroot environment or virtual machine or some container (docker, lxc, etc.) for use with older vendor hardware. All this java thing "write once run everywhere" is only true for some time.

firefox 51 can be downloaded from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/51.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/

or from old distributions repositories. The same with java plugin if you don't have backup. Use 1.6 or 1.7 java versions.

Valdas
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I don't know about Tyan IPMI, but for Supermicro IPMI we use IPMIView. May be it would be Ok for your motherboard.

Alexander Tolkachev
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  • Assuming this would work for a Tyan board (can only check later this evening), can IPMIView be run on Archlinux desktop? – Inxsible Aug 07 '17 at 20:46
  • @Inxsible it could be started on any Linux with installed java. – Alexander Tolkachev Aug 07 '17 at 21:31
  • I tried the IPMIView android app and it couldn't find any IPMI servers on my network, so it doesn't look promising. But I will try it from my linux desktop and see if that works. – Inxsible Aug 08 '17 at 00:28