This is a SuperMicro server with a X8DT3 motherboard which contains an On-board IPMI BMC. In this case, the BMC is a Winbond WPCM450). I believe many Dell servers use this a similar BMC model.
A common practice with IPMI is to isolated it to a private, non-routable network. In our case all IPMI cards are plugged into a private management LAN at 192.168.1.0/24 which has no route to the outside world. If I plug my laptop into the 192.168.1.0/24 network, I can verify that all IPMI features work as expected, including the remote console.
I need to access all of the IPMI features from a different network, over some sort of encrypted connection.
I tried SSH port forwarding. This works fine for a few servers, however, we have close to 100 of these servers and maintaining a SSH client configuration to forward 6 ports on 100 servers is impractical.
So I thought I would try a SOCKS proxy. This works, but it seems that the Remote Console application does not obey my systemwide proxy settings.
I setup a SOCKS proxy. Verbose logging allows me to see network activity, and if ports are being forwarded.
ssh -v -D 3333 stefanl@gateway.example.orgI configure my system to use the SOCKS proxy. I confirm that Java is using the SOCKS proxy settings.
The SOCKS proxy is working. I connect to the BMC at http://192.168.1.100/ using my webbrowser. I can log in, view the Server Health, power the machine on or off, etc. Since SSH verbose logging is enabled, I can see the progress.
Here's where it get's tricky:
I click on the "Launch Console" button which downloads a file called
jviewer.jnlp. JNLP files are opened with Java Web Start.A Java window opens. The titlebar says says "Redirection Viewer" in the title bar. There are menus for "Video""Keyboard""Mouse", etc. This confirms that Java is able to download the application through the proxy, and start the application.
60 seconds later, the application times out and simply says "Error opening video socket". Here's a screenshot. If this worked, I would see a VNC-style window. My SSH logs show no connection attempts to ports 5900/5901. This suggests that the Java application started the VNC application, but that the VNC application ignores the systemwide proxy settings and is thus unable to connect to the remote host.
Java seems to obey my systemwide proxy settings, but this VNC application seems to ignore it.
Is there any way for me to force this VNC application to use my systemwide proxy settings?
