Transcription
So this is an Avocent MergePoint Unity 108E, or just the MPU 108E. This is an IP KVM, so if you don't know, KVM stands for Keyboard, Video, Mouse. Essentially, this unit acts as a giant multiplexer. You can have one keyboard, monitor, and mouse hooked up to this, and then you connect this to a bunch of different computers. You can switch through them as though you're sitting at them, just using one set of interfaces.
Further, this is an IP KVM, so this unit is actually running a little web server. From a browser on another machine in my network, I can hit the IP address of this and then use my web browser to remotely access those aforementioned machines as though I was sitting in front of them. That makes remote management a lot easier.
So Avocent's a pretty interesting company. They were formed in 2000 from a merger of Apex and Cybex, which were really big KVM manufacturers. Over the years, they acquired more KVM and console server companies such as Equinox, Crystal Link, and Cyclades. They were further bought by Emerson Electric in 2009 and then spun off into Emerson Network Power. In 2016, they were sold and rebranded as Verve, so you might see a Verve-branded version of this unit. I've seen Dell has ones as well; they seem pretty popular. But these were definitely pieces of professional gear, if you can tell by the rack ears. They have a lot more features than you're going to find from a consumer KVM.
I was really looking for something like this because I have a couple of machines I wanted to have remotely available. One of them is a Windows 98 machine that needs PS2 keyboard and mouse support. I was looking at something like the Pi KVM, which is great for USB and HDMI stuff, but if you want PS2, you have to build this janky adapter that only sort of works. So it just didn't seem like a viable solution. But this was inexpensive enough; it was under $100, so I thought I'd give this a shot.
If we turn around to the back here, the first thing you might see is two power connectors, so we have redundant power. There are two jacks for LAN interfaces here, so I can hook this up to two different networks. Then let's start with this cluster of modem PD1, PD2 setup, and chain ports. These are all RJ45 ports. The modem port is interesting; I found that this supports a V34, V90, or V92 compatible modem. I'm going to guess that's really just for console configuration.
Similar to this setup port here, you can log into this via RS232 and configure it. I guess if you don't have physical access to it or you can't get to the web browser, you can do config through those ports. Again, these are RJ45 ports; there's a lot of RJ45 ports on this, so they standardized it. I don't believe that this uses like a Cisco rollover style wiring, but you can get these nifty little adapters that have an RJ45 port on one side and a DB25 port on the other, and you can repin these to whatever you need them to be. This one's for my USR net server, but I think I have maybe 10 of these or so, and all of the pinouts for these ports are made available in the manual.
Using that, I can try to interface it with pretty much anything I want that speaks RS232. Going back to these PDU ports here, I saw that Verve, and I guess Avocent, also made PDUs that seem to just speak standard VT100 compatible RS232. Over here, I actually have a couple of other PDUs. This is an APC AP 9211; you can see the DE9 serial port, there's a 10Base-T Ethernet management card, and eight outlets for power. I got that at VCF East earlier this year.
Then this is a Baytech RPC3 remote power control. Here's the EIA 232 port; that's just another name for RS232. This one also has an Ethernet port and eight outlets on the back. I actually got two of those from my buddy Ethan in Ohio when I went to the Dayton Hamvention. I have PDUs that speak RS232, but I'm not sure if these PDU ports are just for Avocent or Verve stuff or if other PDUs are supported.
I saw with the Avocent PDUs, it seems like if you interface with one of these, there's some sort of GUI menu that maps to RS232 config, so you don't have to look at a console. But maybe there's some sort of console option to get right into these, so it would be really cool to be able to use them just for console.
Yeah, but that's definitely something to look at later. If we look in the middle here, we have an HD15 port and four USB ports. This will give you your standard VGA to a local display, local keyboard, local mouse. There are more ports; I discovered that these will use USB ports if you want any sort of mass storage device. You could hook up like a flash drive into here, and then any machine you remote to will have that flash drive available.
I'm not sure if this is just for USB remote storage or if you can put peripherals in there, like a printer or something. Definitely something to look into. But then these eight ports over here, that's the 108E; these are all RJ45 ports that work with different modules. Essentially, you get a four-pair UTP cable or just a standard Ethernet cable. The manual says up to 45 meters, but they also say the same thing for the LAN ports, which is really below Ethernet spec, so you could probably go more than 48 meters.
Then you interface it with these separate modules here. This is a DSAV IQ USB2 module, so it has, I'm going to guess, USB 2.0 and a VGA port. Again, we have the RJ45 connection. But this one is using smaller font, DSAV IQ PS2 M, so we have our PS2 connections. There's also USB, probably for remote or USB mass storage VGA, and this just has a little DVI port converter because the Windows 98 thin client I'm using can put out analog VGA; it's just through this port, so you need an adapter.
I have two of those. Then, much more interestingly, over here, this is a DSR IQ SRL module, so this does RS232 serial with a DE9 port, and it needs its own power supply. I actually did buy the official power supply here, so you can see it has a little squid connector here, so you can power four of those serial modules. But this seems like a pretty standard power supply, so center positive, 6V, 3A, so that's 75mA per serial adapter. You can probably get just your own adapter to power one off of Amazon for a lot cheaper than it would be for this. This was like a $50 adapter; I mostly bought it just because I didn't know what specs I would need.
But yeah, this serial module is probably about $25, but then these old USB and PS2 modules are anywhere between $5 and $15 each. Something cool about this KVM is that it supports a lot of different generations of these modules. It does DSR IQ, which are the oldest, DSAV IQ, which are sort of the middle ones. I don't know a big difference between the DSR IQ and the DSAV IQ modules, but the more recent and expensive ones are the MPU IQ modules, which I don't have any of because they're about $150 each, still as opposed to $5 and $15.
But those newer modules have versions for DisplayPort and HDMI and actual DVI and stuff like that, which I currently don't need, and it's so expensive I probably won't get anytime soon. But even cooler is that this supports different modules for Sun standards. There's the DSR IQ VSSN for VGA Sun equipment and DSR IQ WSN for the 13W3 display connector. I have a couple of those on the way because I do have some Sun hardware I might want to hook up eventually.
But yeah, it seems like these modules are cheap enough you can just get a couple of them, even if you don't need them right away, because you never know when you are actually going to end up needing them.
Yeah, so this KVM I really settled on in particular, not just because it's an IP-based KVM, but I was reading that with the latest firmware, which I've confirmed I have on here, it has been changed from a Java applet when you're doing remote KVM to an HTML5 outlet. In sort of the last swan song for this thing, they added HTML5 support. That means that I can use any modern browser; I don't have to go looking for some ancient IE version. It pretty much future-proofs this for the time being.
The new firmware is Verve branded, works totally fine on this Avocent branded unit. They did a really good job making sure that you can get the most bang for your buck out of these things.
Yeah, so my next step, I suppose, as I mentioned, I did put the latest firmware on this. I played around with it; that was about a year ago. I'm going to try to see if I can factory reset it, sort of start fresh, and just check things out. But I'm going to hook up the Windows 98 machine, my PBX machine, which is really just Debian CLI anyway, so it's not going to be too crazy. But I do want to try that serial adapter, so the channel bank I have you can configure over CAL, so I'm going to try to hook that up as well.
Then, yeah, turn it on, try to get a feel for it, see what we can actually configure. But yeah, ultimately, it's going to be hooked up to those machines. I'm going to throw this in my little networking closet and hopefully just have it sort of sitting and humming back there for whenever I need to connect to any of those machines. I can finally get them off my desk, clear up a ton of space, put it all in the rack, good to go, don't have to look at it.
So yeah, let's get everything hooked up. This is what the KVM looks like when it's all booted up. The boot-up process actually takes a couple of minutes, and at some point, you'll see a screen that has the Verve logo, and it bounces around a little bit, sort of like an old DVD player in standby. But eventually, when it actually boots up, you get to this target list full screen where it shows all of the modules that are plugged in.
Now, I already did a factory reset of this unit right before I started recording, but you'll see I still have some names in here configured for the modules. The interesting thing is that the modules actually keep the name retained within themselves, so if you move a module to a different machine, it'll keep the same name in there despite having been sort of unpaired from whatever unit that it was in before.
But before we actually go into any of these machines and check out the functionality, let's go through some of the options in here. One useful page here is the overview. You'll see that I'm getting a power supply failure warning; that's simply because I just have power connected to power supply B. Unfortunately, it seems like there's no way to disable these, so it'll always be showing me power supply failure, even though I'm running this pretty much as I'm always going to run it.
I mentioned before I did a factory reset, so that can be done with this option here. I won't go into doing that again, but I do want to point out that there's also this upgrade firmware option. At the time that I got this unit last year, almost exactly a year ago, it was running the original Avocent firmware. I was able to go to the Verve website, download the latest firmware, stick it on a USB drive, plug it in, and then upgrade it through there.
You can also use TFTP, FTP, or HTTP, but it's much easier, I would say, to just go right with the USB stick. If you ever want to check to see which version of firmware your Avocent is running, you can go to this version screen right here. I'm using the 2.2.3 and then the sub-version 25987.
One thing you're definitely going to want to do is make sure that you enable either IPv4 or IPv6, depending on your network. By default, none of these are enabled, so I simply checked enable IPv4, enabled DHCP, saved, and then it was able to give me an address on one of my networks here.
If we further walk down the list here, something cool I saw over here in auditing is that these KVMs generate a ton of different events. The UI lags a little bit here; if we go down to the bottom, yeah, so we could see user logged in, user logged out, target session started, stopped, terminated. Now, if you couple these events with destinations here, for example, syslog destinations, you could have remote logging set up.
You can have really good auditing for anybody who's accessing this, which is great if you're trying to make it available to other people and give them access to different machines. If we further go down here for ports, go into IQ adapters here, this will show all of the currently connected adapters. By default, out of the box, you'll see that the name matches the EID, that unique identifier.
What's really cool about this specific page is that you can also go ahead and upgrade the firmware on the modules themselves. Some of the modules have other options, like using USB 1.1, USB 2, but generally, everything seems to work pretty much right out of the box. All of these units, I fully upgraded them to the latest firmware, and I don't have any issues with them at all.
But it's just good to know that the different firmware here for the modules is actually bundled into the Avocent firmware for the MPU itself, so no need to deal with other firmwares. If we keep going down this ports menu tree, we have cascade switches, which I'm pretty sure is if you're sort of chaining these KVMs together.
There's power device; this was not what I had hoped for when looking into if we would have anything to control different types of PDUs. I believe that this is something that's Verve or Avocent specific for their PDUs, and you can sort of link them with login credentials here, but I'm not sure if there's actually anything I can do since I don't have one of their PDUs.
So local port UI, something important to know is the invoke local port UI keyboard combination. Right now, we have print screen and control control selected. I'll be making use of control control, so whenever we're actually remoted into a target machine, if I tap control control, then that brings me back out to the KVM menu, and then I'll be able to go back through all the options here. I won't be stuck in a specific session.
You can also do port security; you can check scan time for online devices. That's the modules and keyboard language. So the modem settings, I don't fully understand here. I mean, I guess we just plug in a modem, and it sort of works magically, but I would have thought that there's a lot more config in here. But again, that's something for another time.
Something with equally as little configuration is the setup port on the back. It looks like you can enable just a basic password to get into that setup port. Not super useful; probably won't touch that, but I guess it's there, and it gives a little bit more functionality.
Now, if we go into sessions, here we can do activity timeouts, login timeouts. This will essentially dump you back out into the KVM menu if you're in a session and you're idle for too long. There's also this concept of sharing, which I'm pretty sure means that you can have multiple people in the same session.
What's cool is that that includes stealth sharing, so you can have somebody monitoring, and it won't even appear here that they're monitoring. Or maybe it means just that they won't have any keyboard mouse input; they can just watch and not interact at all. KVM options, you can enable encryption for the keyboard mouse hardware presented to the target machine.
We want the machines to think we have an English keyboard, 1024 x 768 monitor. Viewer, let's change this; we're going to want the HTML5 viewer in case anybody's going to be logging into this remotely. This was one of the reasons that I bought this unit and upgraded all the way to the latest Verve firmware; I want that HTML viewing option.
Virtual media, again, as I mentioned previously, these devices, I guess the USB devices here that are plugged in, they have access to virtual media. You can even choose which devices get and don't get access to it; you can have read-only or read-write. So it's great if you're trying to load a bunch of files off of USB media that's plugged into the MPU and only want it read from your target devices, so nobody accidentally goes in and modifies anything.
Serial, we can enable telnet access, which is pretty cool. I enjoy having telnet available on things on my network, but I'm not going to use that right now, so I'll leave that as is. While I'm not going to set anything up in user accounts right now, I think it's really interesting the level of granularity you can get over the accounts.
Let's say I wanted to add an account for somebody; I can give them a username, a password. Not sure what preemption level does; maybe that's sort of like an override thing for connecting to sessions. Access level, you could have standard user, a user administrator, an appliance administrator. I would probably give somebody access, and let's say I only want them to have access to the Windows 98 machine. I could give them access to just that machine and, of course, save that.
But we're not going to do anything with users right now; that's all something for me to figure out later, depending on who I want to give access to what. But now we can actually go back to the list of machines here, and we can give everything a try.
Just something to note before I actually go in and check out each machine: this Avocent, as I had shown before, has VGA output. It appears that this is 1024 by 768, and I'm running that through an OSSC open-source scan converter that I had already owned to convert it to HDMI and then split that out for this local display, as well as a cheap HDMI capture device that I got.
So that's what's recording the video for you. But because it is a, should I say, interesting and cheap capture device, when the video is changing between these devices, you're probably going to see some black dropouts, some color bars. On top of that, I think one of the quirks for converting 1024 x 768 to 1080p through this OSSC is that we're going to get a little bit of the edges of the screen cut off at sides, top, and bottom. So it's going to look a little cut off, and you might get some wonkiness in video. I think there's color bars that are going to come up from that HDMI dongle.
But it's important to note that I'm really not going to be using this locally through just a direct KVM with a monitor here. I'm going to do almost everything through the browser, through this thing's browser interface. So even though it's a little cut off, it's still usable. But at the end of the day, it's not a big deal breaker for me, especially with this setup. I could probably fine-tune the OSSC a bit more, but just for demo purposes, it's totally fine.
So let's go into the Windows 98 here. You can see we can rename it if we want to; I'm not going to bother right now. We'll go into KVM session; you can see we're in the Windows 98 machine here. Modem information, so this is just ExpressNet, which is already loaded, which I've shown before. Pretty straightforward; we get the video; it looks like it works fine. If I do control control, I get back; I'll disconnect that active session.
You can keep sessions going; I don't see a real need for that, though. I'll do Cable Salot, so this is actually the machine running Asterisk, which ultimately takes incoming calls and then provides telephony to the modem that is connected to that Windows 98 machine. So this is just Debian CLI, so nothing too crazy. I won't bother logging in; this is pretty much as good as it gets here for Debian on the command line.
So we can just jump back out of that and disconnect the active session. Lastly, we'll go into this serial device. This is actually connected to the Addit 600 Channel Bank. This technically sits between the modem connected to the Windows 98 machine and the Cable Salot Debian box. The Debian box provides a T1 out to this channel bank, which then allows copper-like FXS lines out to hook up to, I think this thing can do, is it 24 or 48 different subscribers? So pretty capable little device, but it's all configurable through RS232.
Using the serial module, you can get in here. So previous session timed out; I can hit enter a couple of times. I can show A1 works perfectly; there are different config options here. If I go into control F8, I have a little bit of control here over the different settings to facilitate that serial connection.
One thing I do want to note is that when I recorded setting this up earlier, I showed just a little yellow gender changer for the DE9 port because both the Addit and the serial module had female connectors, so I needed a gender changer to connect them together. What I should have done was use a null modem gender changer. After I set that up initially, I realized I couldn't get a connection, and I had to swap that out. That was just a little thing that hindered me for about a second before I realized my mistake.
So when I get this machine actually installed, or I should say when I get all of these machines and the KVM actually installed in the rack, I won't have this serial module directly hooked up to the Addit. I have an eight-port console server, which I'm going to hook that up to. This is perfect for the Addit, any Cisco devices that need out-of-band management, maybe some of my Livingston gear or my USR gear, anything that speaks RS232 I can plug into that, and that sort of acts as a multiplexer for serial connections.
This is definitely something that could be useful. Will I actually use this a lot? Because it's sort of like a generated GUI for command line, that makes logging hard, and probably pasting hard. I'm not entirely sure how that works very well or even highlighting, so it's probably not super useful. But at a glance, something just to check configuration, maybe just run a couple of commands seems pretty easy, pretty useful in that sense, but maybe not something that I'm necessarily going to drop down into if I don't have to.
So I can back out to the menu here, disconnect the session. So we're all disconnected. This basically covers the features of using this KVM locally as though you're sitting in front of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. But I'm going to showcase next the use that I actually bought this for, which was to do it via a browser on another machine.
So on another machine that's in my network, I plugged in the IP address of the KVM and tried to load it up here. The first thing when I try to load this up is that I'm prompted to create a password for the admin account, so that seems reasonable enough. I'm just going to use admin admin, English. Okay, log in, and as you can see, we get a very, very similar view that we did when we were trying to access locally.
Just to sort of confirm that things are working, I'm not going to bother walking through everything else again. We can come into the device here, so Windows 98, and you can see that I have the option to do a Java session or HTML5 session. So I want HTML5. Sure, you disable the popup blocker here.
All right, let's try that one more time now that we don't have the popup blocker here. Here we go, perfect. Okay, so if I hit Escape, I can navigate all through the menus. There's a little bit of lag in refreshing. I'm wondering if I can go down here. Let's see, virtual keyboards; looks like we could do an onscreen keyboard if we wanted to. That's pretty useful, a nice little overlay.
We can paste text from a file, screenshot mode; that'd be great for trying to get some images off of these machines that I connect to. Align cursor; I think your cursor can go out of alignment at some point, so you can sort of refresh that positioning. Make this full screen; don't need to do that. Auto, just video. Then we just have generic settings in here.
Okay, aspect ratio for scaling; we can change the performance. If we're on a sort of laggy connection or maybe something slower, we can change that up. Windows macros, text pasting, pretty much everything you would really expect to see from some sort of remote access software here. There's even a little submenu for virtual media macros.
Yeah, shows who's connected, what the address is; pretty easy. This would definitely help a lot if I need somebody else to be able to access one of these machines; they could just hop on right on in. That said, I don't think that I would make this KVM directly accessible over the Internet, even though it has that user password log screen. Who knows when these things are going to continue to get updated, if ever? Who knows if there's any exploits in these?
So I'll definitely put a layer of protection in front of it, but that's a different discussion altogether. For now, this completely does what I want to do by giving me access to a ton of different computers through PS2, USB, or even serial, or even Sun when I get those adapters. It makes everything really easy to configure and makes this available in a browser, HTML5 over the network. Totally fits my use case here, so I'm very happy with this solution.
Really cool to poke around with this again, and the next thing is for me to just get this all installed up and finally put this project of getting these machines regularly usable and available to bed. So hope you enjoyed all of that; I'll keep you up to date with any new advancements that come up from this Avocent KVM.