Greetings. On an ESXi 6 box, I enter a .profile file in / with a few simple aliases in it. It remains just fine when I log out from SSH and log in again. However, if I restart the box, the file disappears. How do I tell ESXi on bootup to not remove this file?
ESXi does not remove that file on boot-up, it simply does not save it. ESXi runs from memory. So if you created some file (i.e. /.profile) it is only in "memory-disk", not in disk-image which is loaded again at the next boot-up.
Either create custom vib and install it as every other, or use rc.local which is persistent (any changes you make to this file survive boot-up). You can create & save that file somewhere else and use rc.local to copy it to /, or use rc.local with shell commands to create .profile at every boot-up.
Wait a minute, you are using ESXi 6.0, right? I'm not sure if there is /etc/rc.local, but it used to be in 5.0/5.5...
ESXi does not remove that file on boot-up, it simply does not save it. ESXi runs from memory. So if you created some file (i.e. /.profile) it is only in "memory-disk", not in disk-image which is loaded again at the next boot-up.
Either create custom vib and install it as every other, or use rc.local which is persistent (any changes you make to this file survive boot-up). You can create & save that file somewhere else and use rc.local to copy it to /, or use rc.local with shell commands to create .profile at every boot-up.
Wait a minute, you are using ESXi 6.0, right? I'm not sure if there is /etc/rc.local, but it used to be in 5.0/5.5...
as per my understanding if you looking for backing up the esxi configuration and changes made, use the below command, the changes should be saved
# backup ESXi configuration to persist changes
/sbin/auto-backup.sh
I edited /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh to copy the file that I keep on one of my datastores. After reboot, it worked fine. (So, yes, this does work in 6.0.) Thanks!
I'm glad it worked for you. BTW you are right: instead of single file /etc/rc.local (as in 5.0) there is now the whole sub-dir /etc/rc.local.d/ but functionality is the same...