Activate or Deactivate SSH Access to Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance

During the VMware Cloud Director appliance deployment, you can leave deactivated or you can activate the SSH access to the appliance. After the deployment, you can switch the SSH access setting.

The SSH daemon runs in the appliance for use by the database HA function and for remote root logins. You can deactivate the SSH access for the root user. The SSH access for the database HA function remains unchanged.

Prerequisites

To make the changes to the OVF properties permanent, you must use the vSphere UI to change the OVF property values. See the Configure vApp Properties topic in the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration guide.

Procedure

1. If you want to make temporary changes to the OVF property, for example, for testing purposes, change the property in VMware Cloud Director.
   1. Log in directly or by using an SSH client to the VMware Cloud Director appliance console as root.
   2. Run the script for activating or deactivating the SSH root access.
      • To activate the SSH root access, run the /opt/vmware/appliance/bin/enable_root_login.sh script.
      • To deactivate the SSH root access, run the /opt/vmware/appliance/bin/disable_root_login.sh script.
2. If you want to make permanent changes to the OVF property, use the vSphere user interface to set the value of the vcloudapp.enable_ssh.VMware_vCloud_Director property.
   Note: You must power off the VM to change the value of the property in vSphere.
   • To activate SSH, set the value of vcloudapp.enable_ssh.VMware_vCloud_Director to True.
   • To deactivate SSH, set the value of vcloudapp.enable_ssh.VMware_vCloud_Director to False.