No VNC Keyboard issue

[techgs]

I am using Proxmox Virtual Environment 5.0-30 on two nodes - fully updated ( Both are Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2420 with 32 GB each & couple of Hard Drives. The proxmox installation is on the top of Debian 9 ( fully updated) with glusterfs. I am very happy about the installation though following is the major problem which I could not resolved it.

When I access the NOVNC console, the mouse is working with no issue. But only ` = [ ] \ / ', keys are working. I can not avail any other keys working. I have both linux ( Debian + Ubuntu ) and Windows ( Win 7 , Server 2012) as Guests. The keyboard layout in proxmox shows 'Default' where is locale on base Debian is English US utf_8.

I have tried "Sendkey" to somehow complete the installation, but thats very very cumborsome and strangely I could not find equallant to keys like :

This appears to be NOVNC issue, but I am posting this as I could not get correct answer anywhere and NOVNC console appears to be only way to handle initial configuration in Proxmox envioronment for remote host.

I have used Internet Explorer, firefox, Opera, Google Chrome ( From Windows ) and Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera ( Windows ) to access NOVNC console while reconfirming the issue.

My initial assessment is a keymap issue. But unfortunately I have no idea on how to resolve the issue.

Request to kindly look into this and avail any way to operate keyboard in NOVNC console.

Thanks in advance.

 

[pabernethy]

What locale are the guests and your client set to? Try setting all parties to the same locale, as there is quite a bit of guesswork involved in NoVNC.

 

[techgs]

On host, guests I have taken care to choose en_us.utf-8 as locale.

But the issue is remained to be resolved.

 

[pabernethy]

What about the client? QEMU expects scan codes as input, but all NoVNC can read from the client is JS key events. So it has to guess the key symbols required by the VNC protocol, according to the client's locale and other factors. The VNC server then has to translate those into scan codes as required by QEMU and can only do so according to the host's locale. These are then sent to the guest, which translates them into characters according to its keyboard layout. I told you there's a bit of guesswork involved
That said, do you have a hardware or software keyboard? Which version of Windows? Which browser versions?

 

[techgs]

What about the client? QEMU expects scan codes as input, but all NoVNC can read from the client is JS key events. So it has to guess the key symbols required by the VNC protocol, according to the client's locale and other factors. The VNC server then has to translate those into scan codes as required by QEMU and can only do so according to the host's locale. These are then sent to the guest, which translates them into characters according to its keyboard layout. I told you there's a bit of guesswork involved
That said, do you have a hardware or software keyboard? Which version of Windows? Which browser versions?

Thank you so much for explaining the architecture.

As desired, I am happy to share all the relevant information.

1) Its a hardware keyboard ( In both the tests )
A) Test from Windows System ( HW - Dell Desktop - Core i5 4th Gen / 16 GB / JRE Latest )
Windows 10 Build No. 10240
Chrome Browser : Version 60.0.3112.113 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Firefox Browser : Version : 55.0.2
Opera : Version 47.0.2631.55
B) Test from Linux System
Debian 9 ( HW -HP - Desktop - Core i5 6th Gen / 8 GB / Openjdk Latest )
FirefoxESR : 52.3.0 (64-bit)

All the test shows same result ~~ novnc console access of vm - Keyboard only keys like [ ]\;' are working. For rest all other key's input is just ignored...

SOS.


Regards,

 

[pabernethy]

And what locale are the clients configured to?

 

[techgs]

[OTE="pabernethy, post: 179267, member: 48822"]And what locale are the clients configured to?[/QUOTE]

Standard : en_us.utf-8

 

[pabernethy]

So host, guest and client all have the same locale, you tried different browsers and operating systems and it's the same issue everywhere.
That feels like we're terribly far to the side of the bell curve. But unless the JS console or the qemu-server log contain further clues, I'm running out of ideas. You might give SPICE a shot, so you can at least work.
Update: Having experienced this, or a similar issue, it might just be a focus issue. I was able to fix the misbehaviour on NoVNC's part by switching to another view (Hardware, Summary, whatever) and back to Console.