LKBEN11096: Howto get on your VMware ESX over sshd / Putty

Symptom

No Connection to VMware ESX server over WinSCP or Putty: "connection refused"

Cause

By Design: under normal conditions, all you need is your VM Infrastructure Client

Solution

This is for the folks, who want or need to get deeper into their VMware server, so make sure you know what you´re doing...

By default, VMware ESX server is "sealed" so that no connection is possible besides VMware Infrastructure Client, the console and the web-frontend.

In order to get yourself a remote shell or to copy files from and to the ESX machine, you need to open the system:

• On your console, open your command shell with <Alt> <F1> and press <Enter> to get to the login-prompt. Login with your root account.
• change to directory /etc/ssh
• edit your ssh configuration with: nano etc/ssh/sshd_config
• change the setting "PermitRootLogin" from "no" to "yes"
• restart your ssh deamon: /etc/init.d/sshd restart

About the Author

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux in different European countries and different European languages. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform where he is one of the most important contributors and the main developer.

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