The virtual console is provided by Hivane for us to be able to enter the unlocking passphrase or debug the server if SSH was down.

We can also use dropbear to unlock this machine.

Access to the console is firewalled, and only skwotcustom and skwotmail can access it so we have to go there through one of these.

One way:

• Open the Firefox profiles manager:
  • firefox -P --no-remote
• If it's the first time you do that, create a new profile and start it.
• Then, in Preferences → Network → Proxy settings
  • Make it go through socks5 127.0.0.1, port 8888
  • Tick "Use remote DNS when socks5 is active"
• Run SSH with dynamic port forwarding, through skwotcustom:
  • $ ssh -D8888 skwotcustom
• Point your newly created Firefox profile to https://hv01-lyn.hivane.net:8006 and login. If our VM is not listed, try hv02, hv03 instead.

Another way

This technique didn't work for me when I tried but I put it here anyway.

• Add the following lines to your local /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 pve01-lyn.hivane.net 127.0.0.1 pve02-lyn.hivane.net 127.0.0.1 pve03-lyn.hivane.net 127.0.0.1 pve04-lyn.hivane.net
• Then run ssh -L8006:hv01-lyn.hivane.net:8006 skwotcustom
• Open a browser to https://hv01-lyn.hivane.net
• Log in and check on which hypervisor skwotmail is running (could be hv01 to hv04)

If the hypervisor is not running on pve01, but say on pve03, close your browser tab and the ssh connection. Instead, run: ssh -L8006:pve03-lyn.hivane.net:8006 Then open a browser to https://pve03-lyn.hivane.net and log in again.

You should now be able to access the console.