8/16-Port KVM over IP Switch
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5. Usage
5.1 Prerequisites
The 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 LAN port of the device.
The following interfaces are supported:
HTTP/HTTPS
Full access is provided by the embedded web server. The IP-KVM switch environment
can be entirely managed using a standard web browser. You can access the 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
IP-KVM switch's serial port via a terminal mode.
The primary interface of the 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 1.4.2 or above. If the browser has no
Java support (such as on a small handheld device), you are still able to maintain your
IP-KVM switch using the administration forms displayed by the browser itself.
Important:
We recommend installing a Sun JVM 1.5.0.4.
For an insecure connection to the IP-KVM switch, we can recommend the following
browsers:
• Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher on Windows 2000 and Windows XP
• Netscape Navigator 7.0 or Mozilla 1.6 on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Unix, Linux and
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.
