Help rebooting a FreeBSD firewall...

[Mateo1041]

Hi everyone,

We currently have a FreeBSD firewall in place for an organization of 15 - 20 people. However, we recently found we need to reboot to change the root password (unfortunately, no one has a record of it here) because we currently can't log in as root.

Should I have any concerns when rebooting? Or is rebooting usually pretty simple? Would I lose any configuration settings by rebooting? I don't think it has been rebooted for quite a long time.

The command I am looking to use is: shutdown -r now

Now that I think about it, we may be denied access though if we are not logged in as root. Is there any other clean way?

Thanks a ton for any help that can be provided. I'm fairly new in dealing with FreeBSD firewalls.

- Matt.

 

[Wishdiak]

Mateo1041,

Are you logged in as a user? You may be able to 'shutdown -r now' (or not), but you will need the root password at some point.

Just to be clear, this is a box running FreeBSD that your incoming/outgoing traffic passes through, yes?

I would try to run 'sysinstall' to change the root password, but I don't guarantee that it will work.





Wishdiak

http://www.wishdiak.com

 

[Mateo1041]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, we can only log on as a user. I did try "shutdown -r now" and it would not let me the other day. So I just restarted manually.

You are correct, this box is only for incoming/outgoing traffic.

I'll try looking into using "sysinstall", thanks. I was able to successfully reboot the firewall the other day, so resetting the password that way should not be a problem I hope if all else fails.

- Matt.

 

[Wishdiak]

Mateo1041,

I'm not 100% sure that running 'sysinstall' as a non-root user will allow you to change the root password. It would be pretty sloppy if it did, but at this point I don't know what your other options are.

Failing that, you could always back up all your data, take the box offline, reinstall the OS and then restore the data.
Make sure that you back up ALL of your data.

Reinstalling the OS will allow you to set the root password during the install.

Good luck,


Wishdiak

http://www.wishdiak.com

 

[Mateo1041]

I've seen the following tip posted on the official FreeBSD website:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/admin.html#FORGOT-ROOT-PW

It almost seems to easy, but might be worth trying out.

Thanks again for all your help.

 

[Wishdiak]

Mateo1041,

If you can reboot the box, then I would definitely try those instructions. In single user mode, you are root. Just don't change the password to anything simple like 'password'



Wishdiak

http://www.wishdiak.com

 

[danimanick]

That will allow you to change the root password - it's happened to us before.

BTW, another command to reboot remotely is simply, 'reboot'.