enabling ESXi ssh

After installing ESXi I found need to ssh into the hypervisor, this isn’t enabled by default. To get it going you need to:

1. At the console of the ESXi host press Alt+F1
   • Alt+F1
2. Type in “unsupported” and hit enter. This is done blindly and you won’t see any indication you are doing anything
   • unsupported
3. If you did step 2 correctly it will prompt you for your root account password now.
   • <root password>
4. You will dropped to a command prompt and need to edit the inetd.conf file
   • vi /etc/inetd.conf
5. Uncomment the lines pertaining to ssh by removing the # sign in front of them
   • this can be done in vi by going to the # sign you want to remove and hitting the ‘x’ key
6. Save your changes and exit, typing :wq!<enter> should force the file to write(save) and quit(exit) you out if vi
   • :wq!
7. Next you need to restart the inet.d process. Figure out what the pid of the inetd process it
   • ps -ef | grep inetd
8. The left most number will be the pid of the process that you need to restart. If the number was 5128 the restart command would be
   • kill -HUP 5128
9. You are all done now and ssh should be accessible so log out
   • exit

If you don’t like my instructions just search for ESXi + ssh and you should find a million other write ups and videos on doing it.