I lost my root password!! What now?

There are several options you can do to reset your root password in the case you lost it.
The following describes two possibilities with different requirements:

1. You need a serial nullmodem cable and a workstation with serial interface and a terminal program
2. You need video and keyboard attached to the firewall.

Each Endian Firewall Appliance will have a serial interface (Console interface) but no Video and Keyboard connectors. If you have your own hardware you probably will have only Video and Keyboard but no Serial Interface.


Solution 1

Connect the serial nullmodem cable to the console port of your Endian Firewall and the other end to your workstations serial port (COM1).
Use a terminal program (Minicom for Unices, PuTTY for Windows) in order to connect to the Firewall. The necessary parameters are:

• 38400 baud
• 8 bit
• No parity bit
• 1 stop bit

After successful connect you should find a menu with 5 possibilities. One of them is "Change Root password".
Select that item and change your password.


Solution 2

1. Connect the video and keyboard and reboot your Endian Firewall.
   
2. During boot you will see a graphical menu on a grey background with title GNU GRUB. Press a cursor button in order to stop the countdown. Otherwise it will boot automatically.
   
   
3. Select the first menu item and press 'a'.
   
   
4. You should see:
   
   grub append> root=/dev/hda3 panic=10 ro
   
   Add 'single' separated with a space in order to finally have this line:
   
   grub append> root=/dev/hda3 panic=10 ro single
   
5. Press ENTER which starts the boot process
   
6. After the boot process the commandline prompt on the bottom of the screen looks like this:
   
   sh-3.00# _
7. type
   mount -o rw,remount /
   
8. type passwd and confirm pressing ENTER
   
   
9. follow the instructions
   
   
10. If you need to change also the admin password, do the following:
    
    htpasswd -m /var/efw/auth/users admin
    
    and follow the instructions.
11. sync
12. reboot