How to run IPMI consoles now that NPAPI plugins are no longer supported?

I have a Tyan S5533 motherboard which serves as my NAS drive. It has a dedicated IPMI NIC, but I cannot start up the Java console since Firefox 52, Chrome/Chromium no longer support NPAPI plugins.

I even tried the Firefox ESR, but that didn't work either. I read on ServerFault that IcedTea doesn't work with IPMI, so I replaced IcedTea with an Oracle JRE on my Arch Linux desktop.

Here is what I would like to know:

• How to get the IPMI Java console working -- is there any browser that I can install on Arch Linux?
• Since Firefox ESR will also only be supported until early 2018, what can be done to use the IPMI Java consoles? I have heard that Supermicro is moving towards HTML5 based KVM consoles, but what about existing boards out there? Will they all get a firmware update to support non-Java-based consoles?

Try javaws <jnlp-URL>. This runs Java plugins outside of the browser.

https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_webstart.xml. Also, look if you vendor offers other tools to work with this.

I finally got the console working. I was using JRE8 which just wouldn't play ball with the jnlp file. It kept giving me FailedDownloadException with a nested exception of SSLHandshakeException as the reason. I even added my IPMI IP address in the exception site list in the java config. No dice !!

I finally downgraded my Java to JRE7u80. I still had to add my IPMI IP to the exception site list, but this time after warning me that running the program could be risky, it still ran it after I confirmed.

So, bottom line, downgrading Java worked.

As for whether KVM consoles will be supported in the future by the browsers :

• The newer boards may get better firmware which support KVM consoles via HTML5 or such
• If existing boards do get firmware updates KVM via HTML5, it is my opinion that this will mostly be for high end server boards and not all manufacturers may do this
• You can continue using JNLP/Web Start. It's just that you won't be able to use the browser plugin. You can still download the *.jnlp file and then manually run Java Web Start

UPDATE: Oracle has removed support for Web Start. I tried using icedtea-web which uses openjdk, but at least for me, the jnlp file never starts the console. I keep getting SSLHandshakeException or a Main Class not found exception. I tried downgrading java all the way from jdk11-jdk6 and I couldn't find the javaws binary in any of the packages. Since icedtea/openjdk doesn't work, my only option is to use ipmiview -- since both my boards are SuperMicro.