Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

If you’re using a System i5 in a SMB environment, you usually don’t have a HMC. From time to time, it’s still necessary to access the service processor’s information, and for this you will need the ASMI.

If you’ve never heard about ASMI before – go look it up.It’s close to HP’s iLO or IBM’s RSA II cards – except without the remote console feature, but i will save this for another rant.

You can access the ASMI using a simple web browser – or so it seems, according to IBM’s ASMI Documentation. However, when you’re using the newest Versions of the common browsers like Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 7, or Opera 9, you can’t access the ASMI, because it uses old (and insecure) versions/ciphers of the SSL protocol.

ASMI worked fine with IE 6, and continues to do so. It even worked with Firefox 1.0. But the newest browser disable these ciphers from the SSL protocol, leading to the problem we currently have. Of course, the solution is easy, one might think. I’ve tried all the SSL related settings in all three browsers in order to enable the legacy SSL protocols so i can access the ASMI – but it didn’t help. Played with alle the settings in about:config in Firefox, but it still didn’t work.

Since i didn’t have much time, i choose the sledge hammer solution – i’ve just used Netscape 4.8 to access the ASMI. This worked flawlessly, and there was even some nostalgia.

And the ASMI really looks like it was designed for Netscape 4.8. I do wonder what IBM is doing – this problem has been around for quite some time now, with no solution in sight. Yes, there probably aren’t that many people using the ASMI directly, since most bigger corporations have a HMC, but this just leaves a bad impression.

UPDATE: I’ve found a document by IBM proposing a Workaround for this issue. It’s rather crude, but better than installing Netscape.