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Dealing with Lost Webadmin Passwords in Novell Security Manager

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3 January 2007 - 3:57am
Submitted by: kmillecam

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Problem

If you lose your Webadmin password in Novell Security Manager, you cannot administer NSM!

Solution

Here are the steps to follow to avoid this problem:

1. Boot from CD (SUSE Live CD, for example).

2. Make a mount of the hard disk drive.

3. If you don't know the partitions, apply the following command:

fdisk /dev/sda (SATA drive)
or fdisk /dev/hda (IDE drive)

then press "P" to print a partitions list.

4. Mount the hard disk partition (e.g., "mount /dev/sda2 /mnt").

5. Go to the /etc directory on the hard drive (e.g., "ie /mnt/etc").

6. Modify the shadow file (which contains the system passwords).

7. On the line which contains root, remove the encrypted password. Before modification:

root:$2a$05$FXDU0OqxNlzdB7msRn33Yeb8bdFST.jxb7pXWXb.KRk0oCaPOjZ5C:13367::::::

After modification (removing the characters between the ":" symbols):

root::13367::::::

8. Duplicate this modification for the "loginuser" user. Now the root and loginuser have no passwords!

9. Remove the bootable CD and reboot the machine.

10. After reboot, login with root user (without password).

11. In the file "/etc/wfe/conf/settings", modify the value "reset_pwd = 0" to "reset_pwd=1".

12. Save the file and reboot.

13. Go to the Webadmin interface. The Webadmin asks you for new passwords for root, loginuser and admin, like the first installation; but, of course, all configuration on your NSM machine is now alive!


Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.



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