(Don't) Fix the Colors in SuperMicro IPMIView
2023-04-26 21:55 - Tech
A while back I set up a home server (and a remote backup server at my Mom's) with one primary goal: Proper KVM-over-IP, so that complete remote support and repair is possible. I ended up building around used SuperMicro server motherboards, which include IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) for remote management, including KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) control and remote virtual USB media (boot from an ISO image located with/controlled by the IPMI client).
I ended up with oldish boards, to make them cheap. Oldish but "enterprise grade" is plenty for my needs! There's a catch though: newish IPMIView clients and oldish servers aren't 100% compatible. Reference some good community documentation at Reddit titled Fix X9DR Supermicro IPMI Colors Broken / Glitched (Archive) which even links to the official SuperMicro support page (Archive) — both of which instruct you to download some files from the IPMI device's built in web server, and replace part of the IPMIView client.
I did that, years ago at this point I want to say. More recently, I was trying to manage these servers, remotely. No matter what I tried, I would always get an error message "Session ID is Expired" when attaching the virtual media to boot from. (And I couldn't find this message documented anywhere online!) Generally to verify that if I reboot, I'll be able to do so from rescue media. But at least once, I really needed to do so. And I couldn't!
I tried lots of things over lots of time. Eventually, I could get it working in a completely blank virtual machine, with just IPMIView installed. Most of the time I did this, I instinctively patched the client files to fix the colors: I've known to do this, and done it as a matter of course, for years. At least once I must not have and after a while I figured out that's where things were working.
It's much more important that my lightly-used rescue environment works than that it looks pretty, so I've reverted the documented patching in all of my IPMIView clients, for now. (Though of course this kind of "for now" turns permanent pretty quickly.)
