Hello,

in his office, a customer have a few Avocent KVM switches to control some client computers in a remote room. He ask me about the possibility to get a list of all computers connected to these boxes, because he do not want to maintain any list by hand.

I research the documention but there is no (scripting) interface from which I could get such a list. SSH is only for connecting serial consoles, SNMP offers no OIDs for such a case.

Because of the costs, DSView isn’t a option. The only way seems to be to extracting the list by reading the Webfrontend HTML output. Let us do this 🙂

I wrote a script in powershell, at least version 2 is needed to handle selfsigned SSL certificates, which do the following:

• Login to the Webfronted with https and SSL encryption by System.Net.HTTPWebRequest class to get the authentification cookie
• Get the Device HTML  page by .NET class System.Net.Webclient and using Authentification cookie
• Save HTML do a temporary file
• Open the file with Internet Explorer
• Get the URL to start a KVM session, computername and portnumber by  DOM

Script details

Define the User, Password, protocol and the devices:

# KVM User
[string]$sUser="Admin"
# KVM Password
[string]$sPassword="YourPassword"
# Protocol
[string]$sProtocol="https"
# Your Devices
[String[]]$aAvocentDevices=@("Console1.domain.local","Console2.domain.local")

Built HTTP POST text and disable SSL certificate warnings

[Byte[]]$aBody=[System.Text.Encoding]::Default.GetBytes("action=login&loginUsername="+$sUser+"&loginPassword="+$sPassword+"&language=de")
[System.Net.CookieContainer]$oCookieContainer = New-Object System.Net.CookieContainer
# Ignore SSL Certificate Warning, requires Powershell 2.0
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = {$true}

Built the login POST request by using System.Net.HTTPWebRequest class

[string]$sLoginURL = $sProtocol+"://$sConsole/login.php"
[System.Net.HTTPWebRequest] $oWebRequest = [System.Net.WebRequest]::create($sLoginURL)
$oWebRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = $false
$oWebRequest.Method = "POST"
$oWebRequest.Accept="application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*"
$oWebRequest.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate")
$oWebRequest.Headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache";
$oWebRequest.UserAgent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.2)"
$oWebRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
$oWebRequest.Timeout = ([System.TimeSpan]::FromSeconds(50)).TotalMilliseconds
$oWebRequest.CookieContainer = $oCookieContainer
$oWebRequest.ContentLength=$aBody.Length
$oWebRequest.Referer=$sProtocol+"://$sConsole/login.php"
$oWebRequest.CookieContainer.Add((New-Object System.Net.Cookie("/home.php-t1s", "1","","$sConsole")));

Getting the authentification cookie and set an avocent specific cookie

# Try to login
$oReqStream = $oWebRequest.GetRequestStream()
$oReqStream.Write($aBody, 0, $aBody.Length)
[System.Net.HTTPWebResponse] $oResponse = $oWebRequest.getResponse()
$oResponse.Headers["Set-Cookie"]="/home.php-t1s=1;"+$oResponse.Headers["Set-Cookie"]

Get the device list as html by using the authentification cookie

$oWebClient = new-object system.net.webclient
$oWebClient.Headers.add("Cookie", $oResponse.Headers["Set-Cookie"])
$oWebClient.Headers.Add("Accept: application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*")
$oWebClient.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding: text/plain, text/html")
# Devicelist as html
$sHTML=$oWebClient.DownloadString($sProtocol+"://$sConsole/target-table.php?id=1&colcnt=4")
$oReqStream.Flush()
$oReqStream.Close()
$oResponse.Close()

Save the HTML Output in a file and open it with Internet Explorer

$sTempFile=[System.IO.Path]::GetTempFileName()+".html"
Set-Content -Path $sTempFile $sHTML
$oIE=new-object -Com internetexplorer.application
$oIE.Visible=1
write-host "file:///$sTempFile"
$oIE.Navigate2("file:///$sTempFile")
while($oIE.busy){
    Start-Sleep 1
    write-host -nonewline "."
}

Get all devices by DOM (Document object model)

for($iLoop=1;$iLoop -le 64;$iLoop++){
    $oEntry=$oIE.Document.getElementByID("name$iLoop")
    if($oEntry){
        # Valid Entry
        $sDeviceName=$oEntry.innerHTML
        write-host "DEVICE:  " $sDeviceName
        $oEntryLink=$oEntry.parentNode
        $oRegEx=new-object System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("targetid=(\d{1,2})$")
        [Int16]$iTargetID=0
        if([System.Int16]::TryParse($oRegEx.Match($oEntryLink.href).Groups[1].Value,[ref]$iTargetID)){
            if($iTargetID -gt 0){
                $sURL=$sProtocol+"://"+$sConsole+"/session_launch.php?action=connect&sessionType=kvmLaunch&targetId="+$iTargetID.ToString()
                Write-Host "PORT:    " $iTargetID.ToString()
                write-host "KVM URL: " $sURL
            }
        }
    }
}

Finally quit IE and remove temporary files

	$oIE.Quit()
	Remove-Item -Force -Path $sTempFile

You can download the whole script by opening the post. It should be easy to generate a website with all your devices. Enjoy the script 🙂

Michael

List Targets which are connected to multiple Avocent KVM switches
ListAvocentTargets.ps1

This script liste all targets which are connected to multiple Avocent KVM switches. It requires Powershell 2.0

Languages:	English
Author:	Michael Albert
Category:	Powershell Scripts
License:	GNU General Public License
Date:	March 15, 2013

4.4 KiB
1511 Downloads
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