Out-of-Band Management

    There are three ways you can manage your VPS even if you locked yourself out with a bad firewall rule or network misconfiguration.

    One involves a web-based console within the Portal, one can be used with a VNC client, and the other is our SSH-based management console

    Web-based Console

    • Within the Portal

      • Click on your VPS service from the "My Services" screen or the Dashboard
      • Find the "Out-of-band Access" section under "Virtual Machine Detail"
      • Click "View Console"

    This feature requires an HTML5 capable browser with WebSockets and Canvas support; for the most part, the following: Chrome, Firefox 3.6+, iOS Safari, Opera 11+, Internet Explorer 9+. IE 6, 7, or 8 will not work.

    VNC

    • Within the Portal

      • Click on your VPS service from the "My Services" screen or the Dashboard
      • Find your VNC settings under "Virtual Machine Detail"
      • Use any VNC client you prefer and connect to the VNC host and port provided.

      This will connect you to your VPS console, as if it were a real machine and you were sitting in front of it with a monitor and keyboard.

    Some things to note:

    • The VNC connection is not encrypted. If this is a concern, do not use this method and instead use the SSH method below.

    • Only 1 VNC connection per VPS is supported. If you leave a connection open on one computer, and try to connect from another, it will hang.

      If you are having problems with hanging connections and can't find the original connection to close it, you will have to let it timeout or hard shutdown your VPS to reset the connection. Simply rebooting the VPS is not enough because the KVM process on our host machine must die to release the original VNC connection.

      Please see the following for instructions on how to hard shutdown your VPS: How do I reboot my VPS

    • When using TightVNC, set the preferred encoding to "Raw"

      This default was changed to "Tight" in newer versions and needs to be changed back to "Raw"

    VNC clients that we know to work well are:

    • TightVNC
    • TigerVNC 1.5.0
    • xtightvncviewer

    SSH

    • Within the Portal

      • Click on your VPS service from the "My Services" screen or the Dashboard
      • Find your "VM Management Server" settings under "Virtual Machine Detail"
      • SSH into the console host using the username provided and hostname provided.
      • Press "c" to "connect to serial console"
      • Enter your Serial Console Password when prompted
      • Press ENTER a couple times and you should see a getty login prompt

    Note

    SSH public key authentication is required to access the management console server.

    You can submit your key instantly using the link provided on your Virtual Machine Details page in the Portal.


    Keywords: out of band, console

    Published