I’m upgrading my VMware cluster to support VMware 7. Currently I’m running 6.5 on three older Dell R710’s and a Dell R410. I’ve rebuilt the R410 to run Ubuntu and run KVM on it as it’s a different VM management solution and the new work uses KVM.
The installation is working fine following the VMware instructions and my environment is somewhat small (but not tiny 🙂 ). I did get an error though. The installer was complaining that my credentials to log in to the existing 6.5 vCenter Appliance had expired. I tried to log in and was successful so it should be working. The stupid thing as noted in the log is it specifically says the password has not expired. So head scratch and google search.
2020-11-25T01:26:36.420Z - info: Password not expired
2020-11-25T01:26:36.421Z - error: sourcePrecheck: error in getting source Info: ServerFaultCode: Failed to authenticate with the guest operating system using the supplied credentials.
Found a solution. Turns out the root credentials actually did expire but expired credentials doesn’t prevent me from logging in.
root@lnmt1cuomvcenter [ ~ ]# grep -i chage /var/log/messages
2020-11-25T01:51:01.687836+00:00 lnmt1cuomvcenter chage[43395]: pam_unix(chage:account): expired password for user root (root enforced)
2020-11-25T01:51:01.688283+00:00 lnmt1cuomvcenter chage[43395]: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required
2020-11-25T01:51:01.693029+00:00 lnmt1cuomvcenter chage[43398]: pam_unix(chage:account): expired password for user root (root enforced)
2020-11-25T01:51:01.693399+00:00 lnmt1cuomvcenter chage[43398]: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required
Well shoot. Log in, change password, and try the installation again. And it works! Success. How annoying though 🙂