As time goes on it’s getting harder to access the remote console on one of my older systems. It requires an old version of Java that just doesn’t work right on modern operating systems. Fortunately, Docker has come to my rescue.

ipmi-kvm-docker is a simple docker setup that will spin up an old version of firefox with the old version of Java that’s required. It wraps it all nicely in a graphical environment inside the docker container and uses novnc to serve this environment up as a web page. You can configure which port it uses, and then you simply connect to your docker host on that port. You can also specify a volume to mount if you have ISOs or other files you’d like your IPMI environment to see. Brilliant.

I simply ran these commands on my docker system to get it up and running:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /your/local/folder:/root/images solarkennedy/ipmi-kvm-docker

Then all I had to do was connect to my docker system on port 8080 in a browser. It worked great. My 10+year old server is still going strong, and easy to reinstall now thanks to this tool.