"The appliance root password has expired" notification on every login to the Cloud Director Availability 4.x Portal

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• After logging into the Cloud Director Availability Provider Portal as either a System Administrator or root user, you see a prompt similar to:

The appliance root password has expired. You must change it before you can start using the service.

• On changing the root password, you are still prompted with this message that the password has expired each time you log into the Cloud Director Availability Provider Portal.
• This issue occurs if you use the chage CLI command on the Cloud Director Availability appliance to adjust the password expiry requirements for the root account.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.x

Cause

This issue occurs when you set the maximum number of days between value for the root user to -1 on a Cloud Director Availability appliance using the chage CLI command in order to disable password expiration time for the root user. However, the Cloud Director Availability Provider Portal interprets any value less than 1 as indication that the root password has expired and needs to be changed immediately.

Cloud Director Availability is designed to assist with the maintenance of the root password by providing notifications of password expiration as well as an interface to update the password when required. Changing the password expiration to a custom configuration can produce unexpected or unintended results.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting Cloud Director Availability.
Currently, there is no resolution.

Workaround:
To work around this issue, increase the maximum number of days between password change value to a number greater than 0.

1. Connect to the Cloud Director Availability appliance via an SSH session or access the command line via the console.
2. Log in with the current root user credentials.
3. Adjust the maximum number of days between password change to a positive number using the chage command:

chage -M 99999 root
Note: Any value greater than -1 and less than 10000 will also set the password expiration date.

4. Confirm the password expiration configuration for the root user:

chage -l root