I’ve noticed this a couple times in the last week – I had an iKVM window open on my Supermicro host, trying to control the ESXi DCUI, and the menu wouldn’t stay open. It’s very frustrating.
I don’t have a physical monitor hooked up to any of my hosts, so this is a pretty important thing to have working in the event I need to change a setting only available on the “physical” host’s menu.
So, in case you landed on this page because you’re trying to figure out how to fix the same issue, here’s what I discovered:
Say you have two ways to interface with the IPMI firmware – like, iced-tea javaws and Supermicro’s IPMIview:
$ ls /opt/IPMIView_2.17.0_200505 account.properties IPMIView20_User_Guide.pdf libSharedLibrary64.so BMCSecurity IPMIView_MicroBlade_User_Guide.pdf libSharedLibrary_v11_32.so email.properties IPMIView.properties libSharedLibrary_v11_64.jnilib iKVM IPMIView_SuperBlade_User_Guide.pdf libSharedLibrary_v11_64.so iKVM32.dll jre PMingLiU-02.ttf iKVM64.dll JViewerX9 ReleaseNotes.txt iKVM.jar JViewerX9.jar SharedLibrary32.dll iKVM.lax JViewerX9.lax SharedLibrary64.dll iKVMMicroBlade.jar lax.jar SharedLibrary_v11_32.dll iKVM_precheck.jar libiKVM32.so SharedLibrary_v11_64.dll iKVM.properties libiKVM64.jnilib sort.properties iKVM_ssl.jar libiKVM64.so stunnel.properties iKVM_v11_32.dll libiKVM_v11_32.so timeout.properties iKVM_v11_64.dll libiKVM_v11_64.jnilib TrapReceiver IPMIView20 libiKVM_v11_64.so TrapReceiver.lax IPMIView20.jar libSharedLibrary32.so TrapView.jar IPMIView20.lax libSharedLibrary64.jnilib
— VS —
$ javaws launch.jnlp selected jre: /usr/lib/jvm/default-java Codebase matches codebase manifest attribute, and application is signed. Continuing. See: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/security/no_redeploy.html for details. Starting application [tw.com.aten.ikvm.KVMMain] ... Buf size:425984 a singal 17 is raised doris getscreen ui lang doris 0 0
The first time this happened, I am pretty sure it’s because another instance of the iKVM window was open (I was unwittingly trying to use a 2nd iKVM – for example, launching launch.jnlp with IcedTea when an IPMIview instance is open – windows get lost sometimes!). This presumably could happen between using two separate remote machines at once, although I cannot confirm from experience.
The menus won’t stay open. It launches, it looks like it should work, but none of the menus will open and none of the keys will respond.
The second time this happened to me, there was no explaination – no other open instances. So I’m here to say:
Just reset your IPMI.
To do that, go to the IPMI’s web portal, log in, and navigate to Maintenance –> iKVM Reset.
Then if there was any instance that wasn’t terminated properly, it will terminate them and allow your menus to work again – which is why I think the 2nd time it wasn’t working, since there was no other instances open at the time.
Best wishes!
