Unsupported Console and SSH on ESXi 4

This will likely not generate as much fanfare as it did for the 3.5 release of ESXi, however I can confirm that it does indeed still work in vSphere ESXi 4. This is the procedure I used to get it up and running on my “Lab” box.

1. alt-f1 (Note: As pointed out below, you will not see your typing on this screen, just trust us, it is there).

2. unsupported

3. root pw

4. vi /etc/inetd.conf

5. delete the “#” from ssh

6. services.sh restart

I’ve also poked around a bit, and found that while scp works, sftp does not. Also note that some commenters had to do the following to get this to work: ps aux |grep inetd (getting the PID) and then kill -HUP PID