VMWare ESX 3.5 – How Do I Open Firewall Ports?

I’ve scored myself a gutsy server with VMWare ESX 3.5 running on it and have been toying with it a little tonight. I’m fortunate to work right next to some of the world’s finest VMWare specialists, some even scoring as much as 70% on their VCP exam. One of them also writes a blog from time to time, which is lucky because I’ve spent some time on there this evening, particularly this post on the suite of esxcfg- commands available.

Opening ports for Veeam FastSCP

I guess having used ESX servers that Dan has configured before I just assumed this would work straight away. I was wrong. I checked every possible thing I could think of with my Windows XP machine before realising that FastSCP was banging away on port 2500 and that wasn’t open on the ESX host.

[root@esx firewall]# esxcfg-firewall -o 2500,tcp,in,FastSCP
[root@esx firewall]# service firewall restart
Stopping firewall                                          [  OK  ]
Starting firewall                                          [  OK  ]
[root@esx firewall]#

Thats after trying for a while to work out how to open a port range. Editing /etc/vmware/firewall/services.xml as suggested here didn’t seem to work.

Letting root logon to SSH

Security? Bah. Laziness wins in the lab.

1. Create some other user you can logon with
2. Switch to root with su – root
3. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config with Vi
4. Find the line PermitRootAccess no to PermitRootAccess yes
5. Save and exit Vi
6. Restart SSH daemon with service sshd restart

Probably nasty ways of doing it, but they work!