Recover Your Password through CLI on CMX 10.5 & Later

Introduction

This document describes the procedure for recovering lost CLI passwords for usernames 'root' and 'cmxadmin' for CMX 10.5 & above.

Pre-requisites

Requirements

None 

Components used

CMX 10.5 VM

Procedure

CMX 10.5 (and above) runs on CentOS 7 as shown below:

Console access is required for this procedure. It could be the VM Console or the physical console depending on the type of appliance used in the deployment.

Step 1

Restart the CMX server and wait until the GRUB boot screen shows up. Select the highlighted option (for rescue mode) & press "e" to edit.

Note:

For CMX 10.6 & above, if prompted for a username and/or password, enter the credentials as username: root and password: password (not the configured root password on the server).

Step 2

Scroll down to the line which starts with "linux16" and remove the "rhgb quiet" parameter at the end of the line. (In latest versions, it can be "rhgb quiet rd.shell = 0")

Step 3

After removing the parameter in Step 2, add the option "rd.break enforcing=0" on the same line.

Step 4

Once complete, press CTRL + X to load the system and boot in Emergency mode. You would notice a new prompt.

Step 5

Remount the file system to be able to write to it, as it is mounted for read-only using the command below:

mount -o remount, rw /sysroot

Step 6

Change the file system root as shown and you would notice the prompt change once complete.

chroot /sysroot

Step 7

Change the password using the passwd <username> command. In the example below, passwords for both cmxadmin and root usernames are changed.

Step 8

Remount the filesystem as Read only using this command:

mount -o remount, ro /

Step 9

Type 'exit' two times to get to the CMX login menu

You are now be able to login with your new credentials