We've had our dedicated server set up to use SOL in web browser for years now. Normally it works OK, but today is one of those times that keyboard input is only partially working.
I only noticed this after monitoring a reboot and going to use '~.> to disconnect. It didn't work. Hitting '~' (tilde, which is shift=# on my UK keyboard) does nothing, even multiple times. Backspace appears to actually perform its function, but without visual feedback. Del doesn't appear to do anything.
Hitting ~ causes no strace-able activity on the "/sbin/getty -L ttyS2 115200 vt100" running on the server. Hitting return does give a new login prompt as expected.
I would have checked the current documentation about setting this up but this URL doesn't cover the server side:
https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/serial_over_lan
and the "(see our guide)" link to http://help.ovh.co.uk/IpmiSol just redirects to https://docs.ovh.com/gb/en/ , and searches on there only lead back to the first URL above, nothing about the actual server setup needed for this to work at all (so good luck new users!).
So, is the shellinabox used for this now outdated versus me using Firefox 68.0.2 on Linux (Debian buster/stable) ? Need a configuration change? Just need a restart of some part of the SOL system ?
Meantime I'll have a look at using SSH access instead (but mostly I use this to monitor reboots to ensure it's progressing through the length BIOS/SAS parts).
I should also note that I'm not MikeA, but one of his colleagues who does the majority of work on this dedicated server.
I needed to update my SSH key, did so (it wouldn't actually accept an Ed25519 one, so had to use an older RSA one). The provided console host then doesn't accept this (but perhaps it's still propagating).
The Java applet doesn't work with Debian Buster/stable 'icedtea-netx' javaws:
Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-1" javax.xml.parsers.FactoryConfigurationError: Provider for class javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory cannot be created
(and much more stack trace).