ESXi and VNC password (RemoteDisplay.vnc.password)

[jim_md]

When enabling VNC access within the .vmx file on ESXi, it seems the password option is ignored:

RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = "TRUE"

RemoteDisplay.vnc.password = "12345678"

RemoteDisplay.vnc.port = "5901"

This is how I used to do it on GSX. But on ESXi, no matter what the password is, I can connect to the vm without a password.(esxi isn't prompting)

Is anyone else having this problem?

[Peter_vm]

Not wanting to prolong this but somewhere in this thread someone wanted an alternative to VNC since the password is a problem.

No. We just want to find out where is the problem with ESX VNC password. That is the topic to discuss.

Password option was working fine with other VMware products, why not ESX35i?

[jim_md]

Can someone from VMware please tell us how to generate the remotedisplay.vnc.key? We know the functionality

exists in ESXi.... We just need to know how to generate they hash/encryption now....

If you just email me the basics, I'll write a script and some documentation to post here.

[nick_couchman]

I'm not sure that anyone (but VMware) knows at this point. I tried a couple different hash algorithms (md5sum, sha512sum) and neither of those matched what VMware was looking for. I'm sure it's one of those somewhat common ones, but until VMware releases their official instructions on it, I'm afraid we won't find out.

[admin]

Sorry for the delay, the guy who wrote the code was out on vacation and just got back. I didn't know if there were any pending legal considerations, so didn't want to post details without talking to him.

The quick answer is that it's DES and Base64.

has a description, sample code, and precompiled binaries for Linux/OS X/Windows.

[Peter_vm]

Thank you for sharing this great info with us. It works well.

[polystatic]

Hi everyone.

First of all i would like to thank you guys for this usefull information. I'm using ESX Server 3.5 and i'm trying to connect to a running VM via VNC. So now that i found out the RemoteDisplay.vnc.password isn't used by this version i am using your compiled c code to generate the RemoteDisplay.vnc.key. This works all fine and the VNC program prompts for a password when connecting. Now my question: Is there any way you could present a solution for computing this key in JAVA. I tried to understand your very good solution in order to convert it to JAVA but it seems you're using special Triple DES keys. I could call the compiled c library out o a script but then i'll loose the plattform independency. So i would be really happy if there is an JAVA solution for this.

Thanks in advance

[dmarrow]

Can someone provide a step by step guide on how to get this to RemoteDisplay.vnc.key to work in the vmx file? I've already downloaded the vncpassword.zip file and still can't figure this out. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.