WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Pre-filled credentials in the vSphere 6.0 Web Client

by // 17 Comments

This past weekend I was finishing up a couple of demo recordings for my VMworld sessions in case the live demos fail for whatever reason, which has happened to me in the past. A few of the demos involve the vSphere Web Client UI and I thought instead of wasting time and potentially fat fingering credentials up on stage, I would try to do everything I can to remove any potential hiccups. In vSphere 6.0, the vCenter Single Sign-On page is now completely in HTML and this not only means you can customize the UI as I have shown here but you can also do some other neat tricks with it.

I decided to update the HTML page to automatically pre-fill both the SSO username and password, so that when I need to login to the vSphere Web Client, I just have to hit the tab key and then click on the login button.

prefilled-credentials
Disclaimer: Outside of a home lab or demo purposes, there is really no good reason for this. I can already hear Mike Foley sighing right now 😉 This also means that anyone who knows the address of your vSphere Web Client can just login, so you may want to only pre-fill the username and still type out the password in case you are concerned with that.

To pre-fill the value for the SSO username and/or password, you will need to edit the following file:

  • Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\unpentry.jsp
  • VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/unpentry.jsp

For pre-filling the username, you will need to add a "value" property along with its actual value in the following section:

<input id="username" class="margeTextInput" type="text" value="*protected email*"/>

For pre-filling the password, you will need to add a "value" property along with its actual value in the following section:

<input id="password" class="margeTextInput" type="password" value="VMware1!"/>

Once you have saved your changes, you can then reload the browser and you should see that the vSphere Web Client now has both the username and password automatically pre-filled when the webpage loads.

vCloud Suite Virtual Appliances: Passwords, Databases, URLs, etc

by // 11 Comments

I recently re-organized my home lab and I got rid of a bunch of VMs for random projects that I have been working on last year. Part of this re-organization was to re-deploy a few of the virtual appliances found within the vCloud Suite. As part of the deployment, I often find myself scouring various documents looking for default credentials to the OS, VAMI interface or the application. It is not always easy to find and I often end up going to Google or the VMTN forums for the answer.

As a fun little exercise, I thought why not deploy all of the latest virtual appliance that are available in the vCloud Suite and just document the latest usernames/passwords for the application, OS, VAMI interface, database configurations, URLs, etc.? This would primarily be a reference for myself, but thought it might also benefit others as well. Duncan Epping had done this awhile back for vCloud Director and few other virtual appliance and funny enough, his site was one of the first ones I found for the default vCloud Director password.

Not only have I deployed all the virtual appliances from the vCloud Suite, which can be seen from the screenshot below,  but I also went through each appliance and validated the credentials for the application, OS or VAMI interface if applicable as well as identify all database credentials and configurations which are not all publicly documented (this took a bit of digging in the appliances, but was not too difficult if you know where to look).

[Read more...]