VLCR Management Access Failure Due to Root Expiry

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

• Administrative logins via SSH or the drc CLI fail with the error: "Connector is initializing, please wait and retry".
• This state occurs exactly at 00:00 UTC daily.
• Standard administrative tasks and privilege elevation (sudo) are blocked.
  
  
  

Environment

VMware Live Cyber Recovery 9.0.1.10

Cause

• Enabling temporary root access (dev root enable) sets the account expiration to midnight UTC (daily granularity) rather than a full 24-hour window.
• Recent PAM security hardening restricts privilege elevation for expired accounts. Because the connector's initialization sequence requires sudo to fetch system status, the expiration causes the "Initializing" loop.

Resolution

This is a known product defect  and is scheduled for a permanent fix in the next software release.

To resolve the issue, manually reset the account expiration by running the command chage -E -1 root.