So while hacking away at a demo I wanted to create a local user on my vSphere ESXi box, and got frustrated that according to all the documentation out there I had to use the vSphere GUI (or vicfg) to create one. Logged on locally to the ESXi box I wondered why the normal “adduser” command wasn’t available, but it turns out it actually is.
vSphere ESXi utilizes a binary called “busybox” for a lot of standard linux commands, as you can see if you look at the linked binaries in /bin:
~ # ls -l /bin/ <snip> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 9 21:41 stty -> /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 9 21:41 sum -> /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 3432 Feb 22 01:27 summarize-dvfilter lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 9 21:41 sync -> /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 9 21:41 tail -> /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 9 21:41 tar -> /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox <snip>
However, “adduser” isn’t there, but it is in the busybox binary itself. To use this command, simply call “busybox” with “adduser” as a parameter, and then the normal “adduser” parameters after that, like this:
~ # /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox adduser BusyBox v1.20.2 (2012-12-11 11:54:28 PST) multi-call binary. Usage: adduser [OPTIONS] USER Add a user -h DIR Home directory -g GECOS GECOS field -s SHELL Login shell -G GRP Add user to existing group -S Create a system user -D Don't assign a password -H Don't create home directory -u UID User id
So, if you wanted to create the user “jonas” as a member of the root group with “/” as home directory and with “/bin/sh” as shell you could simply do this:
~ # /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox adduser -s /bin/sh -G root -h / jonas
