Tag Archives: reset

VMware – vSphere 5.5 U2 – Resetting the SSO Password

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In a previous post I talked about deploying custom SSL certs into a vCenter 5.5 environment. As I was working through the update steps, the Certificate Automation Tool kept bombing out when updating the Inventory Service certificate. Neither the client nor I really knew why this was happening, but I had a bit of a hunch that it something to do with SSO credentials. It turned out to be a lucky guess, as I reset the password a few times and the SSL cert tool started working.

If you find yourself in this situation, there’s a tool provided with vCenter to reset the SSO password. Here’s a link to the KB article.

c:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VMware\CIS\vmdird>vdcadmintool.exe

It’s a fairly straightforward process, but you need to be mindful to use a generated password that meets VMware’s requirements for SSO passwords and special characters. By that I mean that some special characters aren’t allowed, even though they’re in passwords generated by the tool. You can get details on that here. In short, these special characters are not supported in SSO passwords:

  • Non-ASCII characters
  • Ampersand (&)
  • Semicolon ( ; )
  • Double quotation mark ( ” )
  • Single quotation mark ( ‘ )
  • Circumflex ( ^ )
  • Backslash ( \ )
  • Percentage (%)

At times I wasn’t convinced that this list is comprehensive either.

Cisco – Reset snmp user password

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More often than not, I have problems with Cisco MDS switches because I’ve done something stupid. For example, last week I replaced some switch configs but did something to the password for the snmp admin user. As a result, I could log into the switch with admin credentials, and I could see the switch in DCNM, but I couldn’t access it using SNMP credentials. It’s a simple fix, for I’m a simple fellow.

switch1# conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
switch1(config)# snmp-server user admin network-admin auth md5 yourpasswordgoeshere
switch1(config)# exit
switch1# copy run start
[########################################] 100%
Copy complete, now saving to disk (please wait)...
switch1#