HP MicroServer Gen8 iLO and headless management

#hp #sysadmin #microserver #gen8

While tidying up a while ago, I re-found my old HP MicroServer Gen8. I couldn't remember if I'd even used it on the current iteration of my home network or how I'd felt about DHCP at the time, so step zero was finding it on the network. Normally this is not too much of a challenge, since you can just plug in a monitor and keyboard, but I no longer have anything with a VGA port and couldn't remember how the Ethernet ports worked - it has three, a normal one, an iLO one and a third port that can do both.

After much dicking around, I learnt two things:

  1. I could only get the iLO web interface to actually work under Firefox - Chrome and Safari are having nothing of it even after clicking through all the security warnings
  2. other people still have them and care about them, including one excellent hacker who wrote python-hpilo, a tool for managing the iLO from the command line, including ... applying ten years of updates with a few commands.

They also helpfully have a big map of the various versions of the firmware for the various versions of iLO (HP MicroServer Gen8 has iLO4). Bless your cotton socks, @seveas.

Since the old iLO4 I had still required some sort of horrible .NET or Java or Java Web Start nonsense to access a console, I also needed a plan for if I broke it and needed to reinstall it. Fortunately I found debian-headless, a tool for building a hacked up Debian installer image that pre-seeds itself enough to get an SSH server running in the installer context, so once you fish the IP out of your DHCP logs, you can ssh in. Cheers, @philpagel.

Overall, I've been immensely spoiled by my recent foray into enterprise gear that's only nine years old, since it has built-in HTML5 IPKVM and (at least theoretically) can remote mount an installer ISO.

Anyway, I thought I should update the 10 year old iLO firmware, so I went up a 0.1 at a time by incrementing the version in this command: 

uv tool run --python 3.10 --from python-hpilo hpilo_cli 192.0.2.1 -l Administrator -i update_rib_firmware version=2.40

Running this up to 2.81 got me a copyright notice from 2019, and hope against hope, the Remote Console menu had a new option, HTML5 Integrated Remote Console (added in 2.70 to be precise)!!!

Shortly followed by a hugely helpful popup:

This iLO is not licensed to use the Integrated Remote Console after server POST is complete.

Amazing stuff, adding a new feature SIX YEARS AFTER THE HARDWARE IS RELEASED and putting it behind a paywall, absolutely amazing.

Some other facts: