ESXi shutdown via vMA and apcupsd. ssh issue.

Hi,

I'm trying to set up a safe shutdown of our ESXi U4 (free) host using the method described by jholland here.

I have set it up as described in the article and am attempting to test it, for testing purposes I have done the following:

created /ups_shutdown.sh on the ESXi machine containing only "echo TEST SUCCESSFUL"
commented out the last line of the doshutdown section of /etc/apcupsd/apccontrol on the vMA VM so that vMA does not shut down everytime I do a test.

So to test that vMA will call the shutdown script from ESXi I do:

Which returns:

Obviously I'm doing something wrong with either the ssh key generation in ESXi or importing it on vMA.

My only previous ssh experience is limited to " I use putty and it just works" so I'm a bit lost here.

I have followed jhollands instructions to create the ssh key in ESXi a couple of times and it all completes successfully. The last line reads:

"You can now, using WinSCP or scp from another server transfer off the id_rsa.ssh public key file."

Transfer it where? For what?

Given that we need to insert this line into the "doshutdown" section of /etc/apcupsd/apccontrol:

I am assuming that I need to make /root/esxi_id_rsa.pub the pair to the ssh key created in ESXi.

I have tried copying both id_rsa.ssh and id_rsa.pub from ESXi to vMA and renaming them to /root/esxi_id_rsa.pub. Both return the error above.

I have also disabled the vMA firewall as described in version 7 of jhollands howto.

Is there a command to import the ssh key to vMA? I'm pretty sure this is a config/lack of knowledge error on my part.

Interestingly I can do this:

~~vi-admin@vma apcupsd~~$ ssh ~~root@esxihost~~ ./ups_shutdown.sh
~~root@esxihost's~~ password:
TEST SUCCESS

Thanks to Joseph Holland for his work, when I get it working this will solve a real issue for us.

Cheers for reading.

Simon