C H A P T E R
5-1
Cisco NAC Appliance Hardware Installation Guide
OL-20326-01
5
Password Recovery
Recovering Root Password for CAM/CAS
Use the following procedure to recover the root password for a CAM or CAS machine. The following
password recovery instructions assume that you are connected to the CAM/CAS via a keyboard and
monitor (i.e. console or KVM console, NOT a serial console).
Step 1
Power up the machine.
Step 2
When you see the boot loader screen with the “
Press any key to enter the menu…
”
message, press
any key.
Step 3
You will be at the GRUB menu with one item in the list “'
Cisco Clean Access
(2.6.18-128.1.10.el5PAE)
.” Press “
e
” to edit.
Step 4
You will see multiple choices as follows:
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5PAE ro root=/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 console=tty0
console=ttyS0,9600n8 crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5PAE.img
Step 5
Scroll to the second entry (line starting with “
kernel
…”) and press “
e
” to edit the line.
Step 6
Delete the line “
console=ttyS0,9600n8
” and edit the line so it appears as follows:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5PAE ro root=/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 console=tty0 single
Step 7
Press “
b
” to boot the machine in single user mode. You should be presented with a root shell prompt after
boot-up (note that you will not be prompted for password).
Step 8
At the prompt, type “
passwd
”, press Enter and follow the instructions.
Step 9
After the password is changed, enter “
reboot
” to reboot the appliance.
Recovering Root Password for CAM/CAS (Release 3.5.x or Below)
To recover the root password for CAM/CAS on release 3.5(x), you can use the Linux procedure to boot
to single user mode and change the root password:
Step 1
Connect to the CAM/CAS machine via console.
