Monday, April 13, 2009

Riverbed Steelhead Password Recovery

If you lock yourself out of your steelhead box (tested on 4.0 or later), you can recover the password much like a router:

Get Console access.

Boot the appliance (or reboot)

When you see the word grub immediately press E.

Another GRUB menu appears, with options similar to these:
------------------
0: root (hd0,1)
1: kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda5 console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8
-----------------


select the line with kernel in it using up and down arrow keys

Press E to edit the kernel boot parameters.

Append " single fastboot" at the end of this line. Note the space before 'single', it is very important. (And do not enter the quotes.). Press Enter.

Press the B key to continue booting.

After the system starts, at the command prompt, type "/sbin/resetpw.sh" and press Enter.

The password will be blank.

Type "reboot" and press Enter to reboot the appliance.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome! Thank you so much for this article!!!

Anonymous said...

great article.

do you have anyhting for the version 2.0 or 2.1???

Anonymous said...

Beautiful.

Anonymous said...

It doesnt work if you blindly follow the instruction as one step is missing when you recover steelhead password....

Up until below step is fine,

== > Append " single fastboot" at the -end of this line. Note the space before 'single', it is very important. (And do not enter the quotes.). Press Enter.


Now,

--> You MUST select 0: root (hd0,1) and Press the B key to continue booting

if you miss above then Rios will not give you any prompt to type "/sbin/resetpw.sh"

At the end, booting will stop with # prompt where you can do rest like,

--> type "/sbin/resetpw.sh" and press Enter.

--> Type "Reboot" and press entre at last.

Unknown said...

I am using rs v. 8.5.3 (64bit) and upon the first time I switched the devise on and it is asking me for a username and a password. Please help it's urgent