NVP vProxy: Unable to log in using root credentials, root access lost

If the root account is accessible:
If the root account is accessible through the vSphere VM console connection, connect to the vProxy over SSH and login with admin credentials. Switch to the root user account using the below command and specify the root users password.

sudo su -

You can only change (update) the root password if you already have access to the root account.

sudo passwd root

If the admin user password is lost but know the root password, connect to the vProxy from the vSphere web client and login as root. The admin password can be changed with the command:

passwd admin

    
Figure 1: Screenshot of vProxy properties from the NetWorker Management Console (NMC).

If the admin account is locked, log in with the root account from the vSphere web client and reset admin account with pam_tally2 to reset it:

pam_tally2 --user admin --reset

If the admin account continues to become locked, check to see where the login requests are coming from:

journalctl -u sshd | grep -w 'Failed password'

This command lists the IP addresses of systems which attempted (and failed) to login using the admin credentials:

Dec 06 09:23:36 nsr-vproxy02.amer.lan sshd[9407]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=192.168.9.100  user=admin
Dec 06 09:23:38 nsr-vproxy02.amer.lan sshd[9407]: Failed password for admin from 192.168.9.100 port 54788 ssh2

In the above example, we can see that someone attempted to log in as admin using SSH from host 192.168.9.100. The following conditions may apply:

• The host is a NetWorker server with the incorrect vProxy password set in the vProxy properties
• There is an automated tool or script that is configured with the incorrect credentials (This would be outside of NetWorker).
• A user keeps attempting to access the vProxy using the incorrect credentials and locking the account.