Thursday, March 8, 2018

VMware VCSA 6.0 Won't Boot, password is expired and out of disk space

You decide to reboot your VMware VCSA 6.0 and discover it won't start.  Further, you can't log into it.  A fun easter egg VMware built in is that the root password expires after 90 days and log files tend to fill up the server.

To reset the root password-
Boot FULLY into the vcenter appliance.  It will take like 45 minutes.
Reboot, when the GRUB Menu comes up hit Space.  Then hit "P", the password is either your root password or "vmware".
Make sure "kernel" is highlighted, press "e".
Add a space at the end and add "init=/bin/bash", press "b" to boot.
To clear the password history, type echo "" > /etc/security/opasswd
Use the same root password as before so the database starts, to change the root password, type passwd root
To mount the file system, type mount
Type df to check the dispace, if it is at 100% do the following-
cd /var/log/audit
rm -rf auto.log.*
unmount /
mkfifo /dev/initct fi
reboot -f

Unable to backup workgroup servers with Veeam

You are attempting to back up workgroup servers with veeam with application aware processing, however Veeam fails not being able to access the ADMIN$ share.

To disable UAC remote restrictions, follow these steps:    

 - Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
 - Navigate to the following registry subkey: 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
 - Create a new DWORD 32-Bit Value called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
 - Set the value to 1.




In my experience, you do not have to reboot.