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mtrohde
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

SSH to ESXI host without using an administrator account?

Is it possible to SSH to a esxi host with a read only account? 

Our security team wants to scan our ESXI hosts for vulnerabilities and their tool uses SSH.  I dont want to give them an administrator account to do this but everything I have found says SSH only works with administrator accounts.

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TotesHagopes
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

There's a similar thread that asked about this for ESXi 5 - General query:Need to give read only access to new user to access the esxi host through ssh(putty)

I can't comment if vSphere 6 will allow this as well. Typically SSH is disabled, and recommended to be enabled temporarily to access as root for troubleshooting/command line operations.

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mtrohde
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the link, it doesn't work on 6.0 for SSH.

being in /etc/security/access.conf isn't enough to give access.  I had created a domain account with read only access and got it added to /etc/security/access.conf but still can't get in.

Again thanks for trying!

Michael

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