Resetting vSphere 6.x ESXi Account Lockouts via SSH

VMware vSphere has had a good security feature added since vSphere ESXi 6.0 to add a root account lockout for safety. After a number of failed login attempts, the server will trigger a lockout. This is a good safety measure for when you have public facing servers and is even important for internally exposed servers … Read more

Adding SSH Access for DigitalOcean when Using Terraform

We’ve been looking at how to add a little Terraform into your IT infrastructure provisioning toolkit lately. Using DigitalOcean is also super easy and inexpensive for testing out processes and doing things like repetitive builds using Terraform. The first post where we saw how to do a simple Terraform environment build on DigitalOcean appeared at … Read more

Accessing DigitalOcean Droplets via Command Line Using SSH Keys on OSX

As you get rolling with using DigitalOcean and other VPS providers, one of the features that many folks see in the configuration is the “user SSH key to access your instance” options. The trick is that many newcomers to using cloud instances aren’t totally comfortable or fully understand setting up an SSH key for password-less … Read more

PowerCLI: Enabling and Disabling SSH on vSphere hosts

I’m all about running PowerCLI to replace GUI management. Every once in a while there is a requirement to access the ESXCLI on my vSphere hosts, and this is a classic task that is a multi-click process and if you’re using the old 4.x or 5.0/5.1 web client, you may find the process very tedious. … Read more