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dborgill
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Cannot run vmkfstools from Putty (SSH)

On our ESX 3.0.1 hosts, I have created a user named "admin" that is part of the following groups:

users, root, bin, daemon, adm, disk, wheel

I created it in Virtualcenter directly logged into the client. When I SSH in using putty, some have root access and others do not. I tried to get in remote the other day to grow some .vmdk files and I couldn't even run VMKFSTOOLS logged in as admin.

Am I missing something? Is there an easier way to create an all powerful user?

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Dave_Mishchenko
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To get around it, once you have your SSH connection you can run su -l to login as root.

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Dave_Mishchenko
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To get around it, once you have your SSH connection you can run su -l to login as root.

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oreeh
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you have to run vmkfstools as root

jonathanp
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Just log with the admin user and do "su -" command it will ask for the root password and you will have the superuser rights.

It's more secure than alowing root login directly.

To exit you have to logout twice...

Regards

Jon

Message was edited by:

jonathanp

dborgill
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Sorry I couldn't give you all "correct" points but THANK YOU for your quick responses.

What are the commands for the service console to create a new user and give them all rights?

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oreeh
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A user with "full" (I assume you mean root) rights requires the UID to be set to zero.

You can[/b] do this by manually editing the passwd file, but you shouldn't[/b] since this is a possible security breach!

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Dave_Mishchenko
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As oreeh mentions it's not the best from a security view point, but you can use the command usermod to set the user ID to 0.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=544946&#544946

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dborgill
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Oh excuse me, I meant more of just a service account that I can login into SSH with. Doesn't need ROOT privs but enough to get in and do misc tasks.

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