ESX root Password Complexity Workaround

ESX server enforces complexity requirements on passwords and if the one you want to set up doesn’t meet them, password change will fail with something like that:

Weak password: not enough different characters or classes for this length. Try again.

You can obviously play with PAM settings to lower the requirements, but here the the tip on how to really quickly workaround that.

Simply generate a hash for you password using the following command:

# openssl passwd -1

And then replace the root password hash in /etc/shadow with the new one.

From my experience on ESX 4.1, you won’t even need to reconnect the host to the vCenter. It will continue working just fine.

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How to reset Active Directory DRSM password

Login to the domain controller, run ntdsutil from the command line. Then enter:

set dsrm password
reset password on server null

After that you will be asked for the new password.

Changing hostname of the DB2 server

Recently we’ve migrated our DB2 instance to a new server. This involved moving domain name of the old server to the new one. We didn’t change the name of the new server, but just made an alias. After that we changed domain name of the old server because we wanted to leave a backup ground in case something happens. However, after reboot old database refused to start. I found good article here on IBM site, but I couldn’t run any DB2 command from CLI, they stopped working all at once.

The tip here is to go to HKLM\ SOFTWARE\ IBM\ DB2\ GLOBAL_PROFILE and HKLM\ SOFTWARE\ IBM\ DB2\ InstalledCopies\ DB2COPY1\ GLOBAL_PROFILE branches of the registry and change DB2_ADMINGROUP, DB2_USERSGROUP and DB2SYSTEM accordingly. After restart I was able to run DB2 CLI commands.

Then I stick to the IBM article. Particularly I ran the following commands:

db2 uncatalog node SQL
db2 catalog admin tcpip node OLDSQL remote OLDSQL system OLDSQL
db2 update admin cfg using DB2SYSTEM OLDSQL
db2 update admin cfg using SMTP_SERVER OLDSQL

This, along with two reboots, solved the problem.