Avocent KVM over IP switch user manual Usage, Prerequisites, Telnet

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5. Usage

5.1 Prerequisites

The PS/2 IP-KVM switch features an embedded operating system and applications offering a variety of standardized interfaces. This chapter will describe both these interfaces, and the way to use them in a more detailed manner. The interfaces are accessed using the TCP/IP protocol family, thus they can be accessed using the built-in Ethernet adapter.

The following interfaces are supported:

HTTP/HTTPS

Full access is provided by the embedded web server. The PS/2 IP-KVM switch environment can be entirely managed using a standard web browser. You can access the PS/2 IP-KVM switch using the insecure HTTP protocol, or using the encrypted HTTPS protocol. Whenever possible, use HTTPS.

Telnet

A standard Telnet client can be used to access an arbitrary device connected to the PS/2 IP-KVM switch's serial port via a terminal mode.

The primary interface of the PS/2 IP-KVM switch is the HTTP interface. This is covered extensively in this chapter. Other interfaces are addressed in subtopics.

In order to use the Remote Console window of your managed host system, the browser has to come with a Java Runtime Environment version 1.1 or higher. If the browser has no Java support (such as on a small handheld device), you are still able to maintain your remote host system using the administration forms displayed by the browser itself.

Important: We recommend installing a Sun JVM 1.4.

For an insecure connection to the PS/2 IP-KVM switch, we can recommend the following browsers :

•Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP

•Netscape Navigator 7.0 or Mozilla 1.6 on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and other UNIX-like Operating Systems

In order to access the remote host system using a securely encrypted connection, you need a browser that supports the HTTPS protocol. Strong security is only assured by using a key length of 128 Bit. Some of the old browsers do not have a strong 128 Bit encryption algorithm.

Using the Internet Explorer, open the menu entry “? ” and “Info” to read about the key length that is currently activated. The dialog box contains a link that leads you to information on how to upgrade your browser to a state of the art encryption scheme. Figure 5-1 shows the dialog box presented by the Internet Explorer 6.0.

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