Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

Quick tip for internet facing ESXi servers

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 though 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:

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!

---

This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *