PiKVM switch dead on arrival?

PiKVM PiKVM Switch
1

I bought a PiKVM v4 Plus and an Extender. The Plus works fine and I can plug a HDMI device directly into it, and passthrough and the web interface works.

I have the Extender plugged in as well but it’s not working. It shows up as “PiKVM Switch” in lsusb and appears to be alive but the “activity” light on the back is blinking rapidly and constantly and it doesn’t appear anywhere in the web interface.

2

Sorry for the noise. I reflashed the PiKVM and things seem to work now.

I suspect that I broke something early on because I set it up, figured I was “basically on Arch”, and ran pacman -Syu instead of pikvm-update … and then made some random maybe-wrong decisions about which of incompatible packages I should keep.

Alternately, maybe the PiKVM I bought from eBay had a bad image on it from the start … but it was irresponsible of me to try setting up the device without flashing it anyway, even though it was packaged nicely.

3

Okay, after recreating my setup I found that it is failing on the last step: when I put an nginx reverse proxy in front of the device, I’m failing to reverse proxy the websocket. The issue is that even after “disabling HTTPS” on the PiKVM the interface is still using SSL-enabled wss:// websockets.

I don’t have a simple solution but this seems pretty tractable. At least I’m not lost anymore.

4

I haven’t tried disabling https on the PiKVM interface because it is much more secure to just upload your own certificates, but it does mention disabling HTTPS on the same page as the reverse proxy directions. Reverse proxy - PiKVM Handbook

5

Thanks – but if you combine these (disabling HTTPS and also using a reverse proxy) the instructions no longer work, because the websockets need HTTPS. Your linked page does say this: “you will lose the ability to use some features such as Direct H.264 streaming, because browser security policies will require HTTPS for them”.

But I would argue that there are a couple new-user experience issues here:

  • the documentation doesn’t say that “some features such as Direct H.264 streaming” includes “having any indication that your switch is alive or working”
  • the fact that wss connection errors result in silent failures (you need to check the browser console)
  • the fact that these failures cause the “switch” menu item to be missing entirely (which doesn’t really seem necessary; you’d think that at least the power buttons would still work for example) rather than some indication that the browser is unable to determine whether a switch exists
6

As far as we can tell just disabling HTTPS doesn’t cause issues with the Switch UI and switch detection, it may be the extra layer of the reverse proxy. Are you using those exact configs or did you have to modify them further because of disabling HTTPS?