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VMWare permissions

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:11 am
by daveinvb
I'm attempting to monitor VMWare hosts. I've successfully installed the VMWare wizard and it works when I use the ESXi root credentials. Unfortunately, it stores the credentials in plain text in a file named *auth.txt. Storing root credentials like that is a huge security vulnerability. I created a read-only user in vCenter and I'm able to log in and view everything on the hosts, but Nagios gives me an error "ESX3 CRITICAL - Error: Cannot complete login due to an incorrect user name or password". So what are the required permissions for this to work because root is a no-go?

Re: VMWare permissions

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 11:20 am
by tmcdonald
Are there any special characters in the password? Normally this is not an issue if they are stored in an auth file, but things like ! and $ have special meanings in CLI environments which may be causing issues.

Re: VMWare permissions

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 2:39 pm
by daveinvb
Yes, there are special characters because they are required by the password policy. I have changed it from ! to @ with no luck.

Re: VMWare permissions

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 4:13 pm
by ssax
Did you try wrapping the password in single quotes?

Code: Select all

'yourp@ss'