The problem
Today I wanted to kick off a ‘Product Inventory Sync’ of my global environment in Lifecycle Manager before performing some upgrades. But, after a few minutes it failed. The error message suggested that I check to see if the root password had expired. When I logged into the vIDM console, I was immediately prompted to reset the password.
The next problem
Having changed the password as requested, I wondered how long it would be before I would have to change it again. Don’t get me wrong, it is good security practice, but in a lab environment it is a bit of a pain. If you think so to, then here is how you can negate having to change the password ever again.
note: If you are running a cluster, you will need to do this on every node, one at a time
- Login to the console of the vIDM appliance as root. If prompted, reset the password
2. Execute the following command to see the current configuration for the root account. Note the Password expires date.
chage -l root
3. Execute the following command to set the password expiry period to be 9999 days in the future
chage -m 0 -M 9999 root -switch explanation- -m 0 = set minimum number of days between password resets to 0 -M 9999 = set the maximum number of days before you are required to change your password to 9999 root = the account to set this configuration upon
4. Your password expires option will now be 9999 days in the future and minimum number of days between changes will be set to 0
