Saturday, April 04, 2015

ESXi root password complexity

Warning: This is just for lab experimenting and not for production use. 

When experimenting with ESXi in the lab sometimes you have to reset ESXi to default settings. After "Reset System Configuration"from DCUI your password is removed and you have to set the new one.  I prefer to have simple root password in the lab. However ESXi requires pretty strength password complexity and below is procedure how to decrease it.

1/ Login to ESXi shell console.

2/ Edit /etc/pam.d/passwd  (vi /etc/pam.d/passwd)
By default password complexity is set like that
password     requisite    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_passwdqc.so retry=3 min=disabled, disabled,disabled,7,7

3/ Change password requisite to
password     requisite    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_passwdqc.so retry=3 min=disabled, disabled,disabled,1,1

4/ Change root password by command passwd

For  more information look at vSphere documentation.

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