Those Root’s Run Deep – Create a Second Root Account on ESX

Found this in VMware’s KB 1005278

[root@esx root]# adduser -u 0 -o -g 0 -G 0,1,2,3,4,6,10 root2
[root@esx root]# passwd root2
Changing password for user root2.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

After spending some time in the adduser man page, I found that while long, that command makes sense. Here’s what it does:

“-u 0” – Sets uid (user ID) 0, or root’s user ID

“-o” – Tells the system to allow a non-unique user ID

“-g 0” – Sets the initial group to 0 (root)

finally “-G 0,1,2,3,4,6,10” sets the additional groups, you can “cat /etc/group-“ to see what all of those are.