vSphere 4 - Keyboard Reboot Allowed by Default

I just encountered something scary, frightening and down right nerve racking about the defaults that are enabled on vSphere 4. If you walk up to any vSphere 4 (full installation the i versions are not affected by this problem), and press CTL + ATL + DEL, you would expect it to behave just like ESX 3.x and 2.x and nothing should happen; but that is not the case with vSphere 4.

vSphere 4 will actually reboot the ESX host with this key stroke, even if the machine is not in Maintenance Mode. It doesn’t even follow the VM’s Shutdown/Startup procedures it will just halt the virtual machines and proceed to reboot the host machine. Now if you have a datacenter with KVM access and some careless operators that are thinking this is a Windows Server and they need to ‘unlock’ it you can see where this presents such a large problem. The good news is that you can disable this ‘feature’.

Login to the Service Console on the ESX host and type the follow into the command prompt:


vi /etc/inittab


Scroll down until you find this line “ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now”

Add a ‘#"’ to the front of this line to comment out the line and disable the ‘feature’.

Press and hold the shift key and press ZZ to save the file.

Now this file will not update the running configuration automatically, you will run ‘ init q ‘ to force the inittab file to be re-parsed.

I can only hope that vSphere 4 Update 1 which should land any day will disable this feature by default.