Tag: password

HPE MSA2040 Password Recovery / Factory Reset

rthomson Leave a comment

I recently needed to reset the password on an HPE MSA2040 SAN to which I had physical access. It turns out this information was more difficult to find than I had presumed.

The often recommended action is to contact HPE who will send a engineer on-site to reset the MSA password/settings. Don’t hesitate to do that if you have an active support contract. However, here are the instructions for doing it yourself, without a call to support:

  1. Connect to the MSA CLI interface over the USB serial port using putty, minicom or your preferred serial terminal emulator (see HPE documentation).
  2. Hit enter to display to the MSA welcome banner and login prompt
  3. Proceed to login with username restoredefaults and the serial number of the MSA module as the password
  4. The controller will reboot to factory settings, albeit retaining the network (IP) configuration
  5. Once the controller has rebooted, you can login with HPE default username manage and password !manage

Credit to the commentator on these pages whom provided the key information about the “secret” username and password combo to trigger the reset:

RDP Inception and Password Changes

rthomson 1 Comment

A common pain point that seems to come up regularly among technical folks is how to change a Windows account password over an RDP connection.

The correct answer is Control+Alt+End, right? Of course.

However, this doesn’t work as you might expect when you’re lost in RDP “Inception“. RDP inception is when you’re multiple levels deep with RDP connections, such as would be common when using one or more “jump boxes” or intermediate systems.

Example: Local Device->RDP1->RDP2->RDP3

When you’re lost in RDP inception, the Control+Alt+End command is sent to the very first RDP session you are connected to. In our example above, that would be RDP1. So what about changing your password on RDP2, RDP3 or any other systems beyond RDP1? The On-Screen Keyboard (osk.exe) is your new friend. Using osk.exe to bring up the Control+Alt+Del menu is not necessarily intuitive, though.

The Method

  1. Launch osk.exe in the RDP session for which you want to change your password.
  2. Hold down Control+Alt on your physical keyboard connected to your local device.
  3. Click “Del” using the On-Screen Keyboard running in the RDP session for which you want to change your password.

The Control+Alt+Del menu will now appear within the desired RDP session, allowing you to change your password.

Note: The “Desktop Experience” feature appears to be required for osk.exe to launch on Windows Server 2012 and perhaps also 2008 (untested).