How to enter a recovery shell in vIDM

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

A vIDM appliance will sometimes not start some services like sshd if there is a configuration error, consequently no ssh access will be available.

This also prevents the console from providing a shell from which the configuration file can be reviewed and corrected, and the sshd service restarted.

Environment

VMware Identity Manager 3.3.7

Resolution

To gain access to a recovery shell:

1. Reset/reboot the appliance in vCenter, and during the PhotonOS splash screen press 'e' to edit the GRUB options

2. Edit the command to include:

init=/usr/bin/bash

This will present the GRUB menu, which can be edited to provide a bash environment.

 

Additional Information

Keep in mind the / filesystem will be mounted in read-only mode, so to make changes to files, remount the / filesystem in read/write mode:

#mount -o rw,remount /