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Password Reset Simply Does. Not. Work.

I inherited a Sophos UTM software based firewall running on an old ESXi 5.5 box. It boots up and shows 9.3 as the version but in GRUB it shows 9.4 so I have no idea what this thing is actually running.

The customer does not have any passwords for any of the logins. I have tried the password reset procedure of using GRUB bootloader to boot into the limited bash shell. I've reset the password for both loginuser and root at least 30 times now. It never works.

What am I doing wrong? I've done this type of process on other *nix boxes many many times in the past and never had and issue like this.



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Parents
  • There should be a command line:

    Locked out - How to regain all logins
    1) Shutdown the firewall and connect a screen and a keyboard to the firewall
    2) Power on the firewall, wait until the GRUB-loader starts and press ‘ESC’
    3) Select ‘Astaro Security Gateway
    4) Press ‘e’ to edit and select the 2nd entry
    5) Press ‘e’ once again and enter ‘init=/bin/bash’
    6) Press ‘ENTER’ and ‘b’ to boot up
    7) Now you are able to change the passwords for ‘loginuser’ and ‘root’
    8) After that press CTRL + ALT + DEL to reboot the system and wait until you get the login prompt

Reply
  • There should be a command line:

    Locked out - How to regain all logins
    1) Shutdown the firewall and connect a screen and a keyboard to the firewall
    2) Power on the firewall, wait until the GRUB-loader starts and press ‘ESC’
    3) Select ‘Astaro Security Gateway
    4) Press ‘e’ to edit and select the 2nd entry
    5) Press ‘e’ once again and enter ‘init=/bin/bash’
    6) Press ‘ENTER’ and ‘b’ to boot up
    7) Now you are able to change the passwords for ‘loginuser’ and ‘root’
    8) After that press CTRL + ALT + DEL to reboot the system and wait until you get the login prompt

Children
  • Hi Goldy,

    Thanks for the help. That is almost exactly what I'm doing other than this is a software based firewall on an ESXi box. The process is almost the same though with the only difference being I connect via the ESXi virtual console and not with a physical keyboard and monitor.

    The problem is that it shows success changing the password every time but when the UTM reboots, the changed passwords do not work.