Most people will be able to do this in there sleep. I used to be able too, but ran into some issues today when trying this at home. Obviously with vSphere 4 you dont need to do this anymore. This can be enabled through the advanced settings from within the vSphere client.
For those of you not familiar with this task, here is the details.
1) At the console of the ESXi host, press ALT-F1 to access the console window.
2) Enter unsupported in the console and then press Enter. You will not see the text you type in.
3) You will see the Tech Support Mode warning and a password prompt. Enter the password for the root login.
4) You should then see the prompt of #. Edit the file inetd.conf (enter the command vi /etc/inetd.conf).
5) Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #. Save the file. If you’re new to using vi, then move the cursor down to #ssh line and then press the Insert key. Move the cursor over one space and then hit backspace to delete the #. Then press ESC and type in :wq to save the file and exit vi.
6) Once you’ve closed the vi editor, run the command /sbin/services.sh restart to restart the management services.
Now the issue I experienced today was the services.sh restart did not enable SSH, as per update 2. Follow the instructions below to enable SSH.
1) Type ps | grep inetd
2) Note the PID for inetd
3) Type kill -9 PID
4) Type inetd
5) Type /sbin/services.sh restart
The alternative if this does not work for you, is to re-boot your ESXi box, which is not an ideal solution but is an effective one 🙂
Hi Dave, it’s all change again in 4.1 and this can be done from the management menu on the console. You need to enable the unsupported (tech support mode) before you can alt-f1 and there is also the option to enable remote ssh.
Cheers,
Neil.