Many of my customers’ sites use HP blade servers. Depending upon the networking configuration, this means they also use the HP Onboard Administrator and HP Virtual Connect websites. One feature available in HP OA is the ability to open an integrated remote console window to the particular blade server, helping to debug BIOS issues, for example. I suppose the HP developers were frustrated with the constantly changing browser environments as I am, because they implemented this feature with both Java and also with .Net. If one version doesn’t work because of hardening settings, the other will probably work for you.
As it happened, I was trying to use the Java console within Internet Explorer (IE10) and got the error message “Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar:..” which was both cryptic and unexpected. What happened here? This was working last week! The difference turned out to be an upgraded java runtime environment pushed by the regular patch cycle. The solution was:
- Open the Java setting in Control Panel:
- From the Start menu | goto Control Panel
- Click the Java icon
- Navigate to the security exceptions list:
- Click the “See the Security tab” link
- Click the “Edit Site List…” button
- Add the HP OA and all server (VMware host management IPs):
- Click the Add button and add the https:// website by IP address
- Continue adding until all the hosts are included
- Also add the HP OA website to this list
- Click the OK button when the list is complete
- Continue clicking the OK buttons until you’ve existed all the dialog boxes
After making this change, I was able to close IE and reopen it, and viola! The HP OA website and HP java console popup dialog now worked flawlessly. Although I am generally a big proponent of patching, this time it bit me.