Mr. Duncan Epping had an interesting post about removing the ESXi welcome screen and while reading the comments, I noticed Maish's comment regarding another method of removing the ESXi welcome screen along with other services.
There is however, another method if you would like to walk down the fine line of unsupported ... which is fine since both methods described from above are through the means of editing files within the ESXi installer or in the unsupported Buysbox console.
I wanted to share a 3rd method that doesn't require editing files from the installer or using the Busybox console and restarting any services.
Here are the steps:
https://esxi4-1.primp-industries.com/mob/?moid=ServiceInstance&method=retrieveInternalContent
This basically invokes the undocumented and hidden InternalContent and to execute the method, click on Invoke Method
<endpoint xsi:type="ProxyServiceEndpointSpec"> <serverNamespace>/</serverNamespace> <accessMode>httpsWithRedirect</accessMode> </endpoint>
and then click Invoke Method which will then remove this endpoint and you'll see Method Invocation Result: void on the screen as the method does not return a value
Note: You should make a backup of your ESXi configuration ( esxcfg-cfgbackup ) before attempting this in case you run into any oddities.
Great work...AGAIN! Now on to bigger things. How about disabling the ESXi and ESX "home" screens or at least the Ip/hostname display for security?
Dave Convery, VCDX
VMware vExpert 2009
http://www.dailyhypervisor.com
Careful. We don't want to learn from this.
Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"
I don't believe you can change the classic ESX splash screen (please refer to this thread: ). You could try messing around with "chvt" and virtual terminal 11 which is the one displaying the hostname/IP Address for ESX.
For ESXi, there is an advanced option that can be set to customize the DCUI message with any text you would like. Take a look at this script:
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
The chvt method is what I usually recommend for ESX. The ESXi script is perfect. Thanks!
Dave Convery, VCDX
VMware vExpert 2009
http://www.dailyhypervisor.com
Careful. We don't want to learn from this.
Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"
I used this as a workaround for our Security Office's 'hardening standards' in reference to disabling HTTP/HTTPS access to the host.
I'm trying to upload an internally signed certificate, and using vifs fails, so I wrote a powershell script to use https put. However, since I removed the / as stated above, I get the 404 when trying to put the key into /host/sslkey.
I tried to reverse engineer this to add the endpoint back in, but I get:
Method Invocation Result: InvalidRequest
Name Type Value
dynamicProperty DynamicProperty[] Unset
dynamicType string Unset
faultCause MethodFault Unset
faultMessage LocalizableMessage[] Unset
I tried using, and several variations there of:
I could do a reconfigure, but I've configured quite a bit already and don't want to start from scratch.
TIA!
Yes. I had get the same problem(404 prompted when using CLI).
And I want to know if there are any methods to restore it?
Thanks.
edit /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml
change the line
<_length>9</_length>
to add one to the number (your value may be different)
then add to the end of the list before </EndpointList>
<e id="9">
<_type>vim.ProxyService.LocalServiceSpec</_type>
<accessMode>httpsWithRedirect</accessMode>
<port>8039</port>
<serverNameSpace>/</serverNameSpace>
</e>
and the id value should be the _length value minus one (or the same number that was in the _length originally)
have fun