I mentioned in a previous post that I made the jump to Windows 11 on both my work and home laptops. As it turns out, this is causing me to re-evaluate some of my other systems and upgrade them as needed.
Old (really old) Firmware
The HP ProLiant Gen8 Server I have been running for a few years had a VERY old firmware version on it. When I say “very old” I mean circa 2012. For all intents and purposes, it did its job. The few times I use it, however, are the most critical: i.e., the domain controller VMs won’t come up, and I need to use the remote console to log in to the server and restart something.
This particular version of the iLO firmware worked best in Internet Explorer, particularly for the remote access portion. Additionally, I had never taken the time to create a proper SSL certificate for the iLO interface, which usually meant a few refreshes were required to get in.
In Windows 11 and Edge, this just was not possible. The security settings prevented the access on the invalid SSL. Additionally, remote access required a Click-once application running .NET Framework 3.5. So even if I got past the invalid SSL (which I did), the remote console would not work.
Time for an upgrade?
When I first setup this server in 2018, I vaguely remember looking for and not finding firmware updates for the iLO. Clearly I was mistaken: the Gen8 runs iLO 4, which has firmware updates as recent as April of 2022. After reading through the release notes and installation instructions, I felt pretty confident that this upgrade would solve my issue.
The upgrade process was pretty easy: extract the .bin firmware from the installer, upload via the iLO interface, and wait a bit for the iLO to restart. At that point, I was up and running with a new and improved interface.
Solving the SSL Issue
The iLO generates a self-signed, but backdated SSL certificate. You can customize it, buy only by generating a CSR via the iLO interface, getting a certificate back, and importing that certificate into the iLO. I really did not want to go through the hassle of create a certificate authority, or figure out how to use Let’s Encrypt to fulfill the CSR, so I took a slightly different path.
- Generate a self-signed root CA Certificate.
- Generate the CSR from the iLO interface
- Sign the CSR with the self-signed root CA.
- Install the root CA as a Trusted Root Certificate on my local machine.
This allows me the ability to connect to the iLO interface without getting the SSL errors, which is enough for me.
A lot has changed in 10 years…
The iLO 4 interface got a nice facelift in the past 10 years. A new REST API lets me get to some data from my server, including power and thermal data. Most importantly, the Remote Console got an upgrade to an HTML 5 interface, which means I do not have to rely on Internet Explorer anymore. I am pretty happy with the ease of the process, although I do wish I would have known and done this sooner.
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