“Don’t bury the lede”

A working HP ProCurve Java WebUI screenshot to show that I got it working.

My earlier post HP ProCurve 2800 initial setup discussed an initial configuration of a network switch and mentioned in passing that I got the ProCurve Java WebUI working in a relatively safe manner. Here is how I put that together on a modern machine running Windows 10 Professional 64-bit.

^{_{WARNING: It should go without saying that you should not use the FireFox Web Browser from January 2017 that we are setting up here for the very old Java Web App supported on hardware released in 2004 and EOL in 2013 on the public internet. You will be hacked without a doubt in seconds. These are completely unpatched versions of two very very very old pieces of software. You have been duly warned.}}

ISC2 Cybersecurity Certificate (CC) offered for free through the end of 2024 is a nice opportunity to add some skills for people interested in Information Security. The offer includes a full set of online self-paced training materials along with a voucher for taking the certification. No professional experience is required to take and receive this certification. You do have to register with ISC2 for their yearly membership, called an Annual Maintenance Fee (AMF) at $50 USD, but only after you pass the certification. That is a reasonable price to join a professional organization and to get tracked into a future path for the professional certification like the SSCP, CCSP, and CISSP.

I inherited, from a stack of old junk hardware, two Netgear Powerline 500 Nano XAVB5101 plugs. I thought I would try it out for a quick network connection between two floors in my new house using the existing power cabling.

Wow did I learn a lesson in a combination of networking and electrical power the hard way… with a repeatedly blown breaker.

An extended power loss for my primary Proxmox 8 cluster, while I was remote, took half of my cluster nodes out of commission into an unbootable state. This unbootable half of the cluster would not show up on the network after the power came back even with manual physical rebooting. The other half would boot up and show on the network. All the nodes had a second problem that they would not open a PVE WebUI Console Shell or show any output on any of the video output ports for either the Nvidia PCIe GPU or the Intel iGPU. So I have to figure out what looks to be a set of overlapping issues and clean up this mess. There were several lessons learned and re-learned along the way.

First, I need a “crash cart” to recover these to a bootable state. What is a “crash cart”, well that is usually a rolling cart found in a data center that you roll up to a broken server. They typically include some sort of serial terminal and/or a monitor, keyboard and mouse with a lot of connectors and adapters to hook up to random port for the equipment you are fixing. Mine includes adapters for VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI and both USB and PS/2 keyboard and mice. I’ve even thrown in a spare known good Nvidia K600 video card for troubleshooting graphic cards. A trusty and up to date Ventoy Bootable USB is sitting on there as well. I have a laptop that I could use for a serial terminal if we get to that point but I was hoping I didn’t need it since those are mostly for network equipment.

Here is my quickly thrown together trash can crash cart (TC³) for this adventure.