Two root accounts?

[mmaus]

I go into the html GUI of my ESXi host with a local admin account.  I went to Manage > Security & Users > Users and reset the password for the root account.

- I then rebooted the server and on the console screen I can hit the f12 key to Shutdown\Restart and that works fine and allows me to reboot the server. 

- If I try to login to the GUI with to root account I get an authentication error.
- If I try to SSH into this host and use root and the same password I get an authentication error...

Are there two different types of root accounts on an ESXi host? 

[NathanosBlightc]

Are you sure about the capital "R" in typing "root" credentials...? So if you are, it does not seem to be normal. However, please check the /var/log/auth.log file for more information about whatever happened on the ESXi local account ...

[mmaus · Accepted solution]

Update:
I reset the password once again to make sure that I didn't fat finger anything.  I rebooted and tried both "Root" and "root" as login.  Instead of logging into Putty this time I just tried to log into the GUI.

- "Root" came back as an invalid user...as expected.

- "root" came back as a access denied.

- Looking into the logs Amin mentions I noticed "pam_access(sshd:auth): access denied for user `root'"

- I found a posting stating to go to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and confirm "PermitRootLogin" was set to yes

- Right clicking on the Host inside the ESXi GUI and selecting Permissions

- I noticed "root" was not listed in this directory

- Adding the root account back here allowed me to SSH back in again.