After restarting the appliance, some services are not starting and the root account cannot log in
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After restarting the appliance, some services are not starting and the root account cannot log in

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Article ID: 399480

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Updated On:

Products

VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

  • After restarting the Aria Operations for Logs appliance, during boot, several messages appear on the console showing [FAILED] Failed to start for several services
  • Logging in with the root account prompts for a password change, but after changing the password, you cannot log in with the new password
  • Attempting to log in with the old password prompts to change the password again

Environment

Aria Operations for Logs 8.18.x

Cause

When the root (/) partition on the Aria Operations for Logs appliance is full due to the /var/log/messages file being too large, you are not able to change the expired root password and log in.

Resolution

In order to log in as root and truncate the /var/log/messages file, you will need to enter single user mode.

  1. In the vSphere Client, open the console of the desired node.
  2. With the console open, restart with Restart Guest OS or power on the virtual machine.
  3. When the GRUB loader menu appears with the Photon splash screen, immediately press the letter e to launch the GNU GRUB edit menu. Navigate to the end of the line that starts with linux.
  4. At the end of the line, add a space, then type rw init=/bin/bash which adds another option to the line.
  5. Press F10 or CTRL+X to boot the appliance.
  6. Type mount -o remount,rw / to mount the partition in read/write mode.
  7. At the prompt, type ls -lh /var/log/messages to verify the size of the messages file.
  8. If /var/log/messages is several gigabytes in size, truncate it by running this command: truncate -s 0 /var/log/messages
  9. Type sync and press Enter to flush the data to disk.
  10. Type umount / and press Enter.
  11. Type reboot -f and press Enter.
  12. Verify you are able to log in with root and change the password successfully.

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