Using the HP IP Console Viewer app on Linux#

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 22:40:29 +0000

Another success criterion in my current story to get the Machine That Does Everything out of the living room is being able to do things like kernel upgrades without having to go to where it is and plug in a keyboard and screen, and to that end I bidded for and - somewhat unexpectedly - won an HP 1x1x8 IP KVM switch on Ebay.

1. It appears to be actually made by someone called Avocent, though Avocent seem to change their products in non-trivial ways for different badge engineers
2. Along with the switch itself, you need an "Interface Adaptor" for each connected server. This is a thingy that has an RJ45 at one end and a set of keyboard/video/mouse connectors at the other, and should cost around £7 or £8
3. Although you can plug in a keyboard and mouse - and it works just like a local KVM if you do - you will need to connect to the serial port to configure the network settings, there seems to be no way of doing it from a connected keyboard.
4. Although some variants of these things run web servers on ports 80 and 443 which let you download java applets to connect to the servers plugged into them, mine doesn't. I know not why.

   Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-01-08 22:48 GMT
   Nmap scan report for kvm.lan (192.168.0.3)
   Host is up (0.011s latency).
   Not shown: 997 closed ports
   PORT     STATE SERVICE
   2068/tcp open  advocentkvm
   3211/tcp open  avsecuremgmt
   8192/tcp open  sophos
   MAC Address: 00:02:99:03:62:5C (Apex)
   

   None of those responds to HTTP or HTTPS requests
5. So you need to download the software yourself. HP love to rearrange their web site, judging from the number of dead links in the google seearch results, but as of the time I write this you can get it from here and if that link is out of date when you read this you may find the file you need by googling for SP50317.tar
6. Having downloaded it, you must untar it and run the setup.bin shell script. Do this with LOCALE=C or it doesn't work
7. On a 64 bit platform it may complain about missing libraries that you thought you had. This is because it's 32 bit. Users of the Universal Operating System (a.k.a Debian) can grab the necessary with

   $ sudo apt-get install  libxext6:i386 libxtst6:i386 
   

8. Once you're through the setup process, you can start the actual viewer which is called IPViewer. The warning strings: '/lib/libc.so.6': No such file it emits is non-fatal and as far as I can tell entirely ignorable.
9. Its keystroke handling is a bit screwy: I found that it has some kind of 'double echo' problem on the console, so each key I press emits a character once when I press it and again when I release.

   loaclhost login: ddaann

   There is an autohiding menu at the middle of the top of the screen - mouse around near the titlebar to see if you can find it. From this menu I selected Tools →Session Options, and then the 'General' tab. This pops up a dialog box in wich there is a checkbox 'Keyboard Pass-through'. Selecting this option fixed the ddoouubbllee kkeeyyss problem for me. It's not all peachy yet, though, because neither Right Arrow nor DEL seem to do anything in Pass-through mode, and the latter of those is key (sorry) to entering the system BIOS Setup interface.
10. The IPViewer.lax file has some interesting-looking settings, including the path to the JVM it wants (I tried with my system OpenJDK 1.7.025 and it kind of worked but the keyboard didn't work at all_) and the jvm max memory size. More as I find it.