A way around the Challenge-Response system?

[smitj11]

Many aspects of our Avaya setup are unknown since it was installed by contract almost a decade ago, and all of our SMEs have retired without bestowing any wisdom. I've been trying to log into various VMs and some of them appear to need their admin account passwords reset before I can do so. Documentation makes me think that this can be achieved with a root login, but each attempt prompts me for a response to a challenge number.

What are my options here? I am unaware of any response generator that we possess, and this is intentionally a closed system so Avaya tech service would not be allowed in.

 

[dialtonebone]

You would need to get a hold of Avaya and they can authenticate for you and reset passwords. Otherwise you are stuck with going to single user mode to reset it and on some products this may not work/be supported. There may be other ideas though.

 

[kyle555]

What dialtonebone said.

But "almost a decade ago" might mean "not vmware". On VMware, single user mode is trivial with a Centos DVD.