[ale] Vmware esxi 3.5 root password lost

[Lightner, Jeff]

We have an old ESX 3.0.1 environment and all of its guests are Windows 2003 so I'd think 3.5.1 could handle that as well.

I'm not sure if you need to boot with slax or not.   Behind the scenes it looked like it was derived from RHEL so you may be able to simply interrupt the boot, boot into single user and change the password that way.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Justin Goldberg
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 8:00 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: [ale] Vmware esxi 3.5 root password lost

I have a vmware esxi 3.5.1 server I inherited from someone else with a lost password.

My options are:

-boot with slax and modify the /etc/shadow and passwd files within the latest modified state.tgz file, and create another root level user and I can then change the root password (saving a backup of the file just in case).

-null the root password, which I've read on vmware.com can cause problems (but its a standalone server with no NFS and has been offline for a year)

-do a reinstall from cd, which will reset the password and manually add the datastores back.

Fdisk -l shows 1 VMFS partition, but I can list files on the auto mounted /mnt/sda2, sda3, sda5, and sda6 in slax. Also this server has
6 scsi drives.

I'd blow the data away but it has a licensed copy of vmware. Also I'm curious what is running on it.

Also does anyone know if windows 2003 or 2008 runs well within linux vmware?

Thanks


--

Justin Goldberg

*justgold79 at gmail.com*
(504) 208-1158
http://gplus.to/goldberg
http://twitter.com/justingoldberg
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