VSphere 6.5, cannot see files when using WinSCP, i do see them with "ls -a" command via putty.

[FB_stefan]

Dear readers,

I have 2 ESXi hosts running 6.5 and i have a VCenter appliance running 6.5 as well.

I have, so far, only local storage, which i have already used for installing a number of VM's.

SSH service is running on both hosts and i can connect via putty and WinSCP.

WinSCP is something i have used to upload ISO files, because using the webinterface is very unreliable.

At the moment, i want to download a certain VM from a host using WinSCP.
I can browse all VM's via putty, but not the one i want to download, unless i type "ls -a".

NOw that by itself is not so alarming yet, but this does seem to cause the situation i cannot browse it via WinSCP. While i can see the other VM's via WinSCP.

I have tried migrating it, tried renaming it (and then migrating it again) i have tried cloning it, nothing seems to solve this.

It is not a critical thing, but i really want to download the VM folder via WinSCP because i need to reinstall the whole VMware environment and i do not want to reinstall the VM afterwards.

When i look at the access rights, i do not see a clear difference between this VM and the other VM's which are perfectly visible via WinSCP.

I also looked if i could tweak WinSCP to make it visible, but i have not found anything yet.

Does this sound familiar to anyone here? Am i right to use WinSCP? It is such a welcome tool to upload/download files because the hosts are very remote from me and bandwith is limited.

[GaelV]

Hi,

I had the same issue one day, i made a mistake so maybe you too

1) When you start WinSCP by default, the file protocol is SFTP. ESXi allowed SFTP but sometimes it crashes or doesn't function well.

2) You have to choose the SCP file protocol then click Login.

3) Everything has to work fine !

[FB_stefan]

Hi GaelV,

Thanks for the quick reply!

I tried SCP, but that does not make a difference for me.

I am going to try a different FTP client to see what that does.
I find it very confusing.

Via putty i looked at the file access rights, but i cannot see a difference there either between the trouble VM and the other visible VM's.

[GaelV]

Indeed, that's strange..

I think ESXi Shell and SSH are both enabled ?

[FB_stefan · Accepted solution]

I have found the solution. It was the name of the VM that was the issue. The name started with a dot (.)

I removed it, migrated it and i could see it immediately.

This dot in front of the VM name was done by someone else, but i hadn't tried removing it in the renaming i had done myself earlier.