Quick tip for all you with internet facing VMWare ESXi Hosts. I have just got my hands on a box on the Hetzner network (more on that later) and using their LARA system I installed ESXi on it. All was good, then I tried login in a couple hours later and I kept getting errors about my password being wrong… So, I tried a few more times, got pissed off and rebooted the box (had to do a hard reboot, since I couldn’t even get in over KVM). I thought this was a hardware issue, or a config issue, and left it… yesterday, I had the console open most of the day, and when looking at something I noticed this:
<img srcset=" https://res.cloudinary.com/tiernanotoole/image/upload/w_500/v1530620877/20150520-esxi-login-errors.png 500w, https://res.cloudinary.com/tiernanotoole/image/upload/w_710/v1530620877/20150520-esxi-login-errors.png 710w, https://res.cloudinary.com/tiernanotoole/image/upload/w_1000/v1530620877/20150520-esxi-login-errors.png 1000w, https://res.cloudinary.com/tiernanotoole/image/upload/w_1420/v1530620877/20150520-esxi-login-errors.png 1420w” src=”https://res.cloudinary.com/tiernanotoole/image/upload/w_500/v1530620877/20150520-esxi-login-errors.png” alt=””>
Well, that’s why I couldn’t login! So, tip: create a second user account, name it something other than root, give it a secure password and use that to login to your ESXi box. Ideally, your ESXi box should be behind a firewall, but in the case of a dedicated server, that may not be financially feasible… Hope this helps someone!
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