how-to change root password on EC2 AMI?

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#1 Wed, 08/22/2007 - 01:50
tpak

how-to change root password on EC2 AMI?

Howdy -

I've managed to get the AMI started and I can log in with the default password of "changeme" but no matter what I do, I can not seem to change the root password. Am I missing something? I have tried 3 different location under the webmin section with no luck. It says it is changed but no matter what I do it stays the same ....

Any help would be appreciated.

tpak

Wed, 08/22/2007 - 02:11
Joe
Joe's picture

Howdy tpak,

You'd want to look in the Webmin:System menu rather than the Webmin:Webmin menu. The (tricky) thing is that Webmin can have users that use system passwords, or it can have users that have a separate password database (it can also use LDAP, NIS, and several other password types via PAM, but that's irrelevant for you in this case). By default, passwords are checked against the system password database...so it needs to be changed at the system level.

Click the Webmin tab, open the System menu, and click Users and Groups.

Click on "root", and set the password and save it.

There are other ways to change various passwords of various types with Webmin (sometimes I feel like Webmin is too flexible), but this'll do the trick in your case.

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Wed, 08/22/2007 - 06:49 (Reply to #2)
tpak

I in fact did that and just tried it again. When the page comes up, it has the radio for "pre-encryped" checked. I chaned it to "normal", enter a password, and save. Log out, use the new password and it error's out. I put in "changeme", and it works.

I also tried changing the root password from the command prompt with passwd but that seems to not work either.

So far, all I've done is boot the AMI, nothing else. I'm wondering if this is weirdness with AWS since when I tried this with CentOS 4.5 and a manual install under VMware and I think this worked OK.

Any other ideas?

Wed, 08/22/2007 - 06:56 (Reply to #3)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hmm. I dunno. Sounds like something is broken. passwd should, obviously, just work.

Anything in the /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure that give a clue to why it's failing?

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Wed, 08/22/2007 - 16:37 (Reply to #4)
tpak

Nothing. someone is realy trying hard to log in as "Administrator" but we all know where that will get them.

If you want to email me I'll give you the IP of the EC2 instance and you can poke around. Of course, I'm starting your AMI so you can do it that way also.

Fri, 08/24/2007 - 01:13 (Reply to #5)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey tpak,

I can drop in and see what's up. Send over the details to joe@virtualmin.com, and I'll see what I can figure out.

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