Recently I’ve needed to install a virtual machine on my spiffy RHEL 5.3 system, so I turned to VMWare, since its free Server software (1.0 series) worked fine on Ubuntu Dapper.\u00c2\u00a0 So I tried installing Server 2, because newer is better, right (you know where I’m going…)?<\/p>\n
Server 2 does user-level authentication, so you need to specify the admin user at setup time.\u00c2\u00a0 That will be the only user (initially) that can touch the vmware instance.\u00c2\u00a0 This means that if you disable the root password, then you should not choose ‘root’ as that user.<\/p>\n
So this is fine, except that I couldn’t login initially.\u00c2\u00a0 The trick is that VMWare does its own user authentication off of the normal \/etc\/{passwd,shadow} files, and I was authenticating with Kerberos as an AFS user.<\/p>\n
Here’s how to fix things.\u00c2\u00a0 You need to modify \/etc\/vmware\/pam.d\/vmware-authd .\u00c2\u00a0 Upon installation, it contains:<\/p>\n
Since I couldn’t find anything online (this is one thing that google didn’t really know) that fixed things, I hope this is useful and saves a few hours or so for somebody somewhere.\u00c2\u00a0 The closest post<\/a> I found didn’t seem to have a clear resolution and solution.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: If something gets borked and it says your user is unauthorized, you can set the admin user by editing the value in the <ACEDataUser> tag in \/etc\/vmware\/hostd\/authorization.xml .<\/p>\n Let me know if I’ve missed anything–all I can say is that this worked for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I’ve needed to install a virtual machine on my spiffy RHEL 5.3 system, so I turned to VMWare, since its free Server software (1.0 series) worked fine on Ubuntu Dapper.\u00c2\u00a0 So I tried installing Server 2, because newer is …<\/p>\n #%PAM-1.0 <\/code>
\nauth\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 required\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 pam_unix.so\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 shadow nullok<\/code>
\naccount\u00c2\u00a0 required\u00c2\u00a0 pam_unix.so <\/code>
\nYou need to add a line so it looks like:<\/p>\n#%PAM-1.0<\/code>
\nauth sufficient\u00c2\u00a0 pam_krb5.so use_first_pass\u00c2\u00a0 refresh_creds debug\u00c2\u00a0<\/code>
\nauth\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 required\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 pam_unix.so\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 shadow nullok<\/code>
\naccount\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 required\u00c2\u00a0 pam_unix.so <\/code>
\nI used \/etc\/pam.d\/system-auth as a reference. (I’m not sure the ‘debug’ part is needed.)<\/p>\n