Management on old ILO instances

Last Updated or created 2022-10-11

We bought some servers a while ago, but these have old ILO versions (2).

To manage these servers via ILO was no problem until modern browsers refuse to connect to these web services, because of TLS 1.0 issues.

So what i did was using a second user account on my workstation with a old (downloaded from a ESR archive) version firefox. To administer the ILO

wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/50.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-50.0.tar.bz2
extract in other users homedir

usage:
# ssh with X forwarding and start old version
ssh -X otheruser@localhost firefox/oldfirefox

While this was working for me on a debian based machine it didn’t work for my friend who was using Fedora on Wayland.

So i made a more generic solution which would work always. Also when working from windows.

I downloaded a old Fedora version ISO.
https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/iso/
Using the DVD iso i knew the old JAVA was present.

So i started virt-manager and created a new virtual machine

Select your downloaded Fedora 15 ISO

Where is the thin option?!??!

Create a disk image for the OS, don’t worry about the size we are going to shrink it to a minimum (thin provisioned)

Booting from ISO
Do not forget to tick Customize now

Disable all thats not needed! .. Only Gnome Graphical internet .. and JAVA

Create users, complete the install and reboot.
Test your installation.
Shutdown

sudo qemu-img info /var/lib/libvirt/images/fedora15.qcow2
When above gives you a RAW image, you need to convert from RAW to QCOW first.
Mine showed a 9G qcow2 image .. far to large

sudo apt install guestfs-tools
virt-sparsify -v fedora15.qcow2 fedora15spars.qcow2

9665380352 okt 10 13:05 fedora15.qcow2
2926444544 okt 10 13:21 fedora15spars.qcow2
From 9 down to 3GB
Browser works

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