VMware Aria Operations Management Pack Builder stops working after appliance reboot

Today I run into a strange issue where a simple reboot of the MP Builder led to an unreachable MP Builder (UI login page didn’t load). From a network perspective everything looked fine, the machine was reachable and resolvable. The console was responsive as well.

Next step was to check whether the docker image running the MP builder was running correct within the OS. Based on first look (and with little experience with Docker Containers 😊), this was also just fine:

So I figured it must be something within the container. By running the command docker logs mp-builder-app you can review the logs for the specific container (only 1 is running here) running MP builder.

I noticed a lot of messages regarding an expired root password and figured that was likely the cause of the issue.

After a short search on how to access the container I came across this article where step 3.2 explains how to log in to the container as root user:

docker exec -it -u root mp-builder-app bash

As a next step I ran the regular command to check for expired accounts/passwords:

chage -l root

The output showed that the password had expired a few days ago. Running the command chage -M <number of days> root will reset the expiration to any date in the future. Alternatively, you could disable password expiration completely

After setting the expiration date, I exited the container shell and restarted the docker container using docker restart mp-builder-app. A few seconds later, I had a happy MP Builder appliance again:

Not only the docker image was running happily, I could also access the UI again:

More blogpost on use cases I am building with the MP Builder will follow shortly!