Kristof's virtual life

This week I needed to connect to my vCenter over SSH, but when I entered my credentials I got the message “Too many authentication failures”.

Now there are a lot of articles out there, that describe the solution if you immediately get the error, without the ability to fill in your credentials. But for me that was not the case as I got a request for login.

The solution

Don’t fear, if you still have access to one of your SSO accounts, there is a solution for your problem. Just open a SSH connection to your vCenter and logon with e.g. your SSO administrator account. Once you’re logged in execute the following commands:

1. shell.set –enable true
2. shell

Just to show you the progress of my issue. Below printscreen is when I execute a “sudo -i” and I fill in my root password. You see I get an authentication failure.

But we can reset the password with “sudo passwd root”

Now if we execute a “sudo -i” and we fill in the password of the root user you see we have regained access to our root account

Hope this blog can help you save a lot of time and trouble if you lost your root account password 🙂