Problem with vCops admin password.

By | October 15, 2014

Yesterday my customer called me because he wanted to upgrade vCOPS from 5.8.1 to 5.8.3. To do it, it is necessary to log in admin page (https://vcops_ip/admin). Unfortunately he couldn't log in. He got an error:

The user ID and password combination is invalid. Please try again.

It was really curious because we could log in /vcops-wsphere or /vcops-custom using the same credentials! During some investigation I found the following VMware KB:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=2065785

I did as mentioned in the above link and still I couldn't log in the admin page!  Then we decided to reset password as mentioned in the following link:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2001483

Still we couldn't log in....  The problem happens when you change/reset password with special characters (not all).

There is example:

Password: VMware2014! - everything correct

vcops_pass1

Password: VMware2014!25 - problem. Password "has changed"...

vcops_pass2

What is the solution? To put password between single ' '  as shown below:

vcops_pass3

Maybe this is basic Unix knowledge but because VMware  shares more and more software as a appliance, this post would be usefull for "non Unix" people 🙂