Unable to change password of any user account on Photon OS Appliance

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Unable to reset the root password which is expired in Photon OS Appliance.

 

Environment

VMware Identity Manager 3.3.x

Resolution

Kindly follow the below steps to change the user password:

1. Request to secure a snapshot of the VM before proceeding with next steps.
2. Validate the configuration at the OS level.
3. Execute "strace passwd root" command and validate if we get Access Denied errors.
4. Validate the configuration in /etc/pam.d/system-password file to confirm if there are any custom configuration changes.
   Attaching a sample content below for reference:
   root@vidm [ ~ ]# cat /etc/pam.d/system-password
# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-password
password    requisite   pam_cracklib.so     minlen=1
password    requisite   pam_pwhistory.so    retry=3 remember=5 enforce_for_root
password    required    pam_unix.so         sha512 shadow use_authtok
# End /etc/pam.d/system-password
5. Confirm if the configuration mentioned in this file is the default configuration.
6. Comment the last 4 lines in this file and save the file.
7. Once done, execute "passwd root" command and it should give the option to change the root password.

 

Additional Information

When trying the steps from KB article Resetting the root password on a Photon appliance in VMware Aria Automation 8.x "permission denied" message is observed.